SYRIA, THE LAND OF LEBANON
in the fields below that are brighter and the orchards that are heavier with fruit; and from the depths of the moon-painted forest there comes the ring of ten thousand axes that are hewing down the choicest trunks for the Temple of the Lord.
Then the vision fades, and with a sense of personal loss and a regret that is almost anger, you look out again from under the dark branches of the little grove to the bleak, bare mountainside, and the wind in the topmost boughs seems to sing the lament of Zechariah—
"Wail, O fir tree,
For the cedar is fallen,
Because the glorious ones are destroyed:
Wail, O ye oaks of Bashan,
For the strong forest is come down."[1]
Yet still some glorious ones of the strong forest rise proudly on their throne in Lebanon. This tree, so beautiful that it is pictured on the seal of the college at Beirut, has been called the Symmetrical Cedar. These many trunks, apparently springing from a single root, we know as the Seven Sisters. Those two that stand side by side without the wall at a little distance from the main group, are the Sentinels. On a hillside are St. John and St. James, immense, fatherly trees with trunks forty-five feet in circumference and gigantic forks in which a dozen people
- ↑ Zechariah ll:2f.
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