comes from the mountains, and the snow rarely lies on the ground for more than twenty-four hours.  It seldom rains during the autumn and winter months, but frequent showers fall in the early days of spring.  Vegetation then awakes again, and the soil lends itself to cultivation in the hollows of the valleys and on the table-lands wherever irrigation is possible.  The ancients dotted these now all but desert spaces with wells and cisterns; they intersected them with canals, and covered them with farms and villages, with fortresses and populous cities.  Primaeval forests clothed the slopes of the Amanos, and pinewood from this region was famous both at Babylon and in the towns of Lower Chaldaea.  The plains produced barley and wheat in enormous quantities, the vine throve there, the gardens teemed with flowers and fruit, and pistachio and olive trees grew on every slope.  The desert was always threatening to invade the plain, and gained rapidly upon it whenever a prolonged war disturbed cultivation, or when the negligence of the inhabitants slackened the work of defence:  beyond the lakes and salt marshes it had obtained a secure hold.  At the present time the greater part of the country between the Orontes and the Euphrates is nothing but a rocky table-land, ridged with low hills and dotted over with some impoverished oases, excepting at the foot of Anti-Lebanon, where two rivers, fed by innumerable streams, have served to create a garden of marvellous beauty.  The Barada, dashing from cascade to cascade, flows for some distance through gorges before emerging on the plain:  scarcely has it reached level ground than it widens out, divides, and forms around Damascus a miniature delta, into which a thousand interlacing channels carry refreshment and fertility.  Below the town these streams rejoin the river, which, after having flowed merrily along for a day’s journey, is swallowed up in a kind of elongated chasm from whence it never again emerges.  At the melting of the snows a regular lake is formed here, whose blue waters are surrounded by wide grassy margins “like a sapphire set in emeralds.”  This lake dries up almost completely in summer, and is converted into swampy meadows, filled with gigantic rushes, among which the birds build their nests, and multiply as unmolested as in the marshes of Chaldaea.  The Awaj, unfed by any tributary, fills a second deeper though smaller basin, while to the south two other lesser depressions receive the waters of the Anti-Lebanon and the Hauran.  Syria is protected from the encroachments of the desert by a continuous barrier of pools and beds of reeds:  towards the east the space reclaimed resembles a verdant promontory thrust boldly out into an ocean of sand.  The extent of the cultivated area is limited on the west by the narrow strip of rock and clay which forms the littoral.  From the mouth of the Litany to that of the Orontes, the coast presents a rugged, precipitous, and inhospitable appearance.  There are no ports, and merely a