176 TRANSACTIONS OF THE [APR. 23, 
which Tel-el-Faras is prominent, commences the mountain 
system of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon. 
The plain of Jawalan, the Leja, and Haurdan, occupy the gap 
between Gilead and the Hermon range, and extend eastward to 
Jebel-el-Duruz. They are composed of volcanic emissions of 
more or less antiquity, and the soil is exceedingly fertile. The 
black basalt of this region furnishes the building material for 
most of the stone houses of Bashan. . 
The detached volcanic chain of Jebel-ed-Duruz forms the 
eastern boundary of this great table-land, and still presents 
several well preserved craters, the most marked of which are 
Tel-Shihan and Jebel-Juléb, 5,400 feet high feet. From the 
latter and its two companion craters has flowed the great 
lava sea of the Leja, one of the most remarkable on the globe. 
The surface of this great mass, thirty miles in length and 
breadth, is tossed into great waves, crested with lava foam, and 
rent by deep crevasses and cafions, in which the Druzes find 
their ‘‘ Refuge” (the signification of Leja) from their Turkish 
and Arabic enemies. 
The southern flanks of Hermon are volcanic. Lake Phiala 
is an extinct crater, filled with water. But the main mass of 
Hermon and its continuation northward in the range of el-Jebel- 
esh-Sharqi, or Anti-Lebanon, is cretaceous limestone. A range 
of old volcanic cones stretches away northward from Jebel-ed- 
Duruz to, and far beyond, the latitude of Damascus toward 
Aleppo. 
Hermon is a little more than 9,000 feet high, and the range of 
Jebel-esh-Sharqi nowhere rises higher than 7,000 feet. It sinks 
gradually into the table-land, south of Hems, at the ‘‘ Enter- 
ing in of Hamath,” before alluded to. 
North of the ‘“‘ Entering in of Hamath,” there is no proper 
mountain range, but only a series of low undulations which form 
a watershed between the Orontes valley and the Syrian desert. 
Between the two great mountain systems just described is the 
fourth strip, the wonderful cleft of the Arabah, the Dead Sea, 
the Jordan, Celesyria, and the Orontes valley. 
The Arabah is a broad chasm between the plateau of the Tih 
and the mountains of Idumea. A transverse dyke, of no 
great altitude, about one-third the distance from the head 
of the gulf of Aqabah to the Dead Sea, divides this valley into 
two parts. The southern belongs to the Red Sea, while the 
northern was probably a part of the much more extensive Dead 
Sea of the past. ‘The floor of this great valley is seamed and 
riven into deep interior valleys and cafions, and is one of the 
most desolate regions on the globe. It exhibits, at various 
depths, all the formations of Sinai and Palestine. 
