History of Phoenicia | Page 7

a considerable stream even in summer, and in the rainy season it is a barrier to intercourse, caravans sometimes remaining encamped on its banks for several weeks, unable to cross."[21] The soil of the plain is shallow, the rock lying always near the surface; the streams are allowed to run to waste and form marshes, which breed malaria; a scanty population scarcely attempts more than the rudest and most inefficient cultivation; and the consequence is that the tract at present is almost a desert. Nature, however, shows its capabilities by covering it in the spring-time from end to end with a "carpet of flowers."[22]
From the edges of the plains, and sometimes from the very shore of the sea, rise up chalky slopes or steep rounded hills, partly left to nature and covered with trees and shrubs, partly at the present day cultivated and studded with villages. The hilly region forms generally an intermediate tract between the high mountains and the plains already described; but, not unfrequently, it commences at the water's edge, and fills with its undulations the entire space, leaving not even a strip of lowland. This is especially the case in the central region between Berytus and Arka, opposite the highest portion of the Lebanon; and again in the north between Cape Possidi and Jebili, opposite the more northern part of Bargylus. The hilly region in these places is a broad tract of alternate wooded heights and deep romantic valleys, with streams murmuring amid their shades. Sometimes the hills are cultivated in terraces, on which grow vines and olives, but more often they remain in their pristine condition, clothed with masses of tangled underwood.
The mountain ranges, which belong in some measure to the geography of Ph?nicia, are four in number--Carmel, Casius, Bargylus, and Lebanon. Carmel is a long hog-backed ridge, running in almost a straight line from north-west to south-east, from the promontory which forms the western protection of the bay of Acre to El-Ledjun, on the southern verge of the great plain of Esdraelon, a distance of about twenty-two miles. It is a limestone formation, and rises up abruptly from the side of the bay of Acre, with flanks so steep and rugged that the traveller must dismount in order to ascend them,[23] but slopes more gently towards the south, where it is comparatively easy of access. The greatest elevation which it attains is about Lat. 32o 4��, where it reaches the height of rather more than 1,200 feet; from this it falls gradually as it nears the shore, until at the convent, with which the western extremity is crowned, the height above the sea is no more than 582 feet. In ancient times the whole mountain was thickly wooded,[24] but at present, though it contains "rocky dells" where there are "thick jungles of copse,"[25] and is covered in places with olive groves and thickets of dwarf oak, yet its appearance is rather that of a park than of a forest, long stretches of grass alternating with patches of woodland and "shrubberies, thicker than any in Central Palestine," while the larger trees grow in clumps or singly, and there is nowhere, as in Lebanon, any dense growth, or even any considerable grove, of forest trees. But the beauty of the tract is conspicuous; and if Carmel means, as some interpret, a "garden" rather than a "forest," it may be held to well justify its appellation. "The whole mountain-side," says one traveller,[26] "was dressed with blossoms and flowering shrubs and fragrant herbs." "There is not a flower," says another,[27] "that I have seen in Galilee, or on the plains along the coast, that I do not find on Carmel, still the fragrant, lovely mountain that he was of old."
The geological structure of Carmel is, in the main, what is called "the Jura formation," or "the upper oolite"--a soft white limestone, with nodules and veins of flint. At the western extremity, where it overhangs the Mediterranean, are found chalk, and tertiary breccia formed of fragments of chalk and flint. On the north-east of the mountain, beyond the Nahr-el-Mukattah, plutonic rocks appear, breaking through the deposit strata, and forming the beginning of the basalt formation which runs through the plain of Esdraelon to Tabor and the Sea of Galilee.[28] Like most limestone formations, Carmel abounds in caves, which are said to be more than 2,000 in number,[29] and are often of great length and extremely tortuous.
Carmel, the great southern headland of Ph?nicia, is balanced in a certain sense by the extreme northern headland of Casius. Mount Casius is, strictly speaking, the termination of a spur from Bargylus; but it has so marked and peculiar a character that it seems entitled to separate description. Rising up abruptly from the Mediterranean to the height of 5,318 feet, it dominates the entire region