BAALBEK. 
215 
culous. In the midst of mud-roofed huts may he seen stand¬ 
ing out in solitary relief the remains of a beautiful Corinthian 
column; and over some miserable doorway the choicest spe • 
cimen of a cornice, supported by blocks of rough stone. Some 
of the inhabitants, loth to destroy the work of the genii, have 
built their huts around the standing columns, scattered here 
and there, so that in projecting through the roof they form a 
very pretty ornament. Old arches and gateways are so 
patched up and remodeled that little else save the material 
remains to show their origin. The principal mosque is evi¬ 
dently all, or nearly all, rebuilt from the ruins of some ancient 
edifice, portions of it being so put together as to destroy all the 
harmony of the different parts. I believe this is the work of 
the Turks ; it looks very much as if it was done by people who 
were ignorant of the difference between a column and a cornice. 
From an elevation a little beyond the chief ruins there is a 
fine view of the Castle of Baalbek and the Temple of the Sun. 
These are the principal objects of interest. I made a sketch 
of them, which is now before me ; but I can not undertake to 
describe them. It is a mighty mass of ruins of walls, of col¬ 
umns, and towers—a picture of desolation made more desolate 
by all that survives the ravages of time. The castle, or 
palace, is a long rambling edifice, composed of immense walls 
and mouldering towers; parts of it have probably been rebuilt 
by the Saracens, and some recent patching in white seems to 
have been done by the Turks, who evidently have a great 
taste for putting columns where cornices belong, and patching 
up dark old walls composed of immense blocks with little 
pieces of white stone about a foot square. The enormous size 
of some of the blocks of stone in the main walls of the palace 
is one of the chief objects of interest. Three of these, in the 
wall at the rear of the grand temple, measure sixty feet each, 
and form together a surface of a hundred and eighty feet in 
length and fifty-four in width, all of solid stone. Considering 
the distance these have been carried from the quarry, and the 
height to which they have been elevated in the wall, it would 
seem that the people of those days must have had some very 
powerful mechanical means of overcoming the difficulty. 
