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let me explore them with rapture; orchids, pale cyclamens, a huge flax-blue geranium, the scarlet-petalled Persian tulip, and the red anemone that flowers for Adonis.
    Presently we were out of the cultivation and running along switchback ridges where grey shrubs clung to the rock, and the only flower was the yellow broom. The air was crystal clear, and in wonderful contrast to the heavy air of the coast. Now and again we saw a flock of the Eastern-looking sheep, cream or honey-coloured or spatchcocked with black, moving with drooping ears and heads carried low as if always looking for food. Glossy black goats grazed with them, and each flock bunched closely round its shepherd, a solitary figure standing wrapped in his
burnous
, arms crossed over his stick, watching gravely as we went by.
    The road climbed. The altimeter needle moved steadily to the right. The air grew piercingly fresh. The yellow broom dropped below us, and at the verges of the narrow way tufts of grey, thin leaves hunched among the stones. The car swerved terrifyingly round bends with rocks threatening to scrape the offsidewing, and on the other side a sheer abyss where crows and ravens tilted and croaked below us.
    Then suddenly there was space on both sides. We were running along the hogsback of a dizzyingly exposed ridge with, to the left, a prospect of white rock and blue distance and crest on crest of wooded mountain to the sea; and deep down on our right, ice-green, flashing and hiding and flashing again as it rushed and curled down its great forested gorge, ran the Nahr Ibrahim, the Adonis River.
    And presently, dipping through rocky gorges which trapped the sun here and there and allowed thin apple trees to blossom with their feet deep in the red anemones, we came to the Adonis Source itself.
    The source of the Adonis River has been magic, time out of mind. To the primitive people of a thirsty land, the sight of that white torrent bursting straight out of its roaring black cave half up a massive, sun-baked cliff, suggested God knows what gods and demons and power and terror. It certainly suggested fertility … the river carries life with it for thirty water-seamed mountain miles. And where the water bursts from the rock the corrie is suddenly green, and full of trees and flowering bushes, and the red anemone grows along the torrent side.
    So here, treading on the ghostly heels of Isis and Ishtar and Astarte and the Great Mother herself who was Demeter and Dia and Cybele of the towers, came Aphrodite to fall in love with the Syrian shepherd Adonis, and lie with him among the flowers. And here the wild boar killed him, and where his blood splashed,anemones grew, and to this day every spring the waters of the Adonis run red right down to the sea. Now the corrie is empty except for the black goats sleeping in the sun on the ruined floor of Aphrodite’s temple, and against the roar of the torrent the drowsy stirrings of the goat bells come sharp and clear. The rags that flutter from the sacred tree are tied there as petitions to the last and latest Lady of the place, Mary.
    Even without the legends, it would have been breath-taking. With them, the scene of white water and blazing rock, massive ruins, and bright flowers blowing in the wind from the fall, was something out of this world. And as we turned eventually out of the corrie on to the track – it could hardly have been called a road – that would take us home by a different route, the scene had its final touch of Eastern fantasy.
    A little way beyond and out of sight of the Adonis corrie, a few Arab houses straggled along the waterside. A path, a white scratch on the rock, climbed out of this at an angle to the road. And up this path, going easily, went a chestnut Arab horse, the white
burnous
of its rider filled out by the motion like a sail, the scarlet and silver of the bridle winking in the sun. At the horse’s heels cantered two beautiful dogs, fawn-coloured greyhounds with long silky hair,