A Ride through Syria to Damascus and Baalbec, and ascent of Mount Hermon

In the winter of 1887, Edward Abram set out from Port Said on a journey that would carry him through some of the most ancient and storied landscapes on earth. Guided by a Bedouin Sheikh across the Syrian plains, he rode through Tiberias beside the still waters of Lake Galilee, past the sacred and bloody history of the Holy Land, into the rose-colored city of Damascus with its maze of bazaars and centuries of empire layered in stone. From there he pressed north into the Lebanon, to the colossal Roman ruins of Baalbec where columns taller than cathedral spires rise from the Mediterranean hills, and finally to Beirut and the sea. But the journey's climax awaits on the slopes of Mount Hermon, that snow-capped sentinel whose summit the ancients believed touched the dwelling of the gods. Written with the Victorian traveler's reverent eye for the picturesque and the archaic, Abram documents a world on the cusp of transformation. This is travel writing as archaeology of the living present, where every village name recalls an empire, and the Bedouin guides still carry traditions untouched by the century rushing toward them. For readers who long to see the Near East before the automobile, the telegraph, and the Great War remade it forever.