CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS
RAILWAYS and carriage-roads In Syria are chiefly due to French enterprise. The Société Ottomane des Chemins de Fer de Damas, Hama et Prolongements has less rolling stock than its lengthy name might lead one to expect, and its slow schedule is not always observed with a mechanical Western exactness. Although Damascus is barely fifty miles from Beirut, the journey thither takes ten hours; for the constantly curving railway measures more than ninety miles and the total rise of its numerous steep grades is over 7,000 feet. This single, narrow-gauge road, which is carried over two high mountain ranges, is an admirable example of modern engineering, and the scenery through which it passes is a source of unbroken delight.
As we zig-zag up the western slope of Lebanon there appear, now at our right and now at our left, a succession of beautiful panoramas which differ one from the other only in revealing a constantly widening horizon. Rich, populous valleys, lying deep between the shoulders of the mountains, slope quickly downward to the coast where, farther and farther be-
