. The land of Gilead, with excursions in the Lebanon . ut my companion could not resist a sketch,and I found abundant occujiation in making the rough meas-urements, which, however, are only approximative, as I hadno tape, and it was impossible to pace areas so filled up withhuge masses of rock that it was necessary literally to climbacross them ; and I did not then know that they had been ex-amined and described by M. Ernest Kenan. The temple, ac-cording to an inscription which he copied, is dedicated to deog^eyioTog, The Great God, and dates from the year A. d. Fakra was supplied wit
. The land of Gilead, with excursions in the Lebanon . ut my companion could not resist a sketch,and I found abundant occujiation in making the rough meas-urements, which, however, are only approximative, as I hadno tape, and it was impossible to pace areas so filled up withhuge masses of rock that it was necessary literally to climbacross them ; and I did not then know that they had been ex-amined and described by M. Ernest Kenan. The temple, ac-cording to an inscription which he copied, is dedicated to deog^eyioTog, The Great God, and dates from the year A. d. Fakra was supplied with water led over a low hill fromthe Neba-el-Leben, or milk spring, about two miles followed the conduit to this spot, and found a magnificentstream gushing out of the base of the precipitous limestonerange with a force and volume sufficient to turn a dozen here it dashes down in a roaring cataract till it disap-pears from view in a limestone chasm, where it precipitatesitself in a fall of about a hundred feet. One can walk up to. THE NATURAL BRIDGE. 387 this fall from below, but the rocks almost meet overhead, ap-proaching each other so closely just below the fall that anactive man with good nerves could easily spring across. Itwas, in fact, a feat which would have been eminently temptingin the days of ones youth ; and even at a more mature periodof life, I felt doubtful whether one ought to resist the instinctwhich seems implanted by nature of risking ones neck for thefun of the thing. But the object which from this point rivet-ed our attention was the Jisr el Hajar, a huge natural bridge,which spanned the gorge a hundred yards or so below thechasm, at an elevation of about a hundred feet from the bed ofthe torrent. The gorge here is about a hundred and fifty feetacross, and the bridge itself is so broad and level that a goodcarriage-road could be made over it. It is, in fact, a flat pieceof limestone-rock, from ten to fifteen feet thick, but on theunder
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, booksubjectsyriade, bookyear1881
