week of pleasure being expired, the party set forward towards the south, and proceeding for five hours along the coast, arrived at a high rocky promontory, intersecting the road, and looking with a smooth, towering, and almost perpendicular face upon the sea. This appears to be the promontory called by Strabo, but wherefore is not known, [Greek: to ton] [Greek: Theon Prosopon], or the Face of God. Near this strangely-named spot they encamped for the night under the shade of a cluster of olive-trees. Surmounting this steep and difficult barrier in the morning, they pursued their way along the shore until they arrived at Gabail, the ancient Byblus, a place once famous for the birth and worship of Adonis. In this place they made little or no stay, pushing hastily forward to the Nahr Ibrahim, the river Adonis of antiquity, the shadows of Grecian fable crowding thicker and thicker upon their minds as they advanced, and bringing along with them sweet schoolboy recollections, sunny dreams, which the colder phenomena of real life never wholly expel from ardent and imaginative minds. Here they pitched their tent, on the banks of the stream, and prepared to pass the night amid those fields where of old the virgins of the country assembled to unite with the goddess of beauty, in lamentations for Adonis,
Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a summer's day,
While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood
Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the love-tale
Infected Sion's daughters with like heat,
Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch
Ezekiel saw, when by the vision led
His eye surveyed the dark idolatries
Of alienated Judah.
The night was rainy and tempestuous, and when they looked out in the morning the Nahr Ibrahim had assumed that sanguine hue, which, according to Lucian, always distinguishes it at that season of the
