It would take a man in perfect health to carry away even an approximate impression of Baalbec. Trying to remember now, I seem to have spent the afternoon in some amazing delirium of tumbling walls and ruined colonnades; of heaped and piled fragments; of scarred and defaced sculpture; of Titanic masonry flung about by the fury of angry gods. Athens had been a mellowed and hallowed dream of the past; Ephesus a vast suggestion of ancient greatness buried and overgrown; Baalbec was a wild agony of destruction and desecration crying out to the sky.
[Illustration: FROM THE TIME OF ADAM BAALBEC BECAME A PLACE OF ALTARS]
It is a colossal object-lesson in what religions can do when they try. Nobody really knows who began to build temples here, but from the time of Adam Baalbec became a place of altars. Before history began it was already a splendid Syrian city, associated with the names of Cain, Nimrod, and Abraham, and it may have been Cain himself who raised the first altar here when he made that offering for which the Lord "had not respect." More likely, however--and this is the Arab belief--it was the city of refuge built by Cain, whose fear must have been very large if one may judge from the size of the materials used.
Cain could not fail to build a temple, however. He would try to ease the punishment which he declared was greater than he could bear, and with burnt offering and architecture would seek to propitiate an angry God. How long the worship inaugurated by him lasted we can only surmise--to the flood, maybe--but the Phoenicians came next, and set up temples to their Gods, whoever they were, and after the Phoenicians came Solomon, who built a temple to a sort of compromise god by the name of Baal--a deity left over by the Phoenicians and adapted to Judean needs and ceremonies--hence the name, Baalbec. Solomon built the temple to Baal to satisfy certain of his heathen wives, and he made the place a strong city to rival Damascus--the latter having refused to acknowledge his reign.
After Solomon, the Romans. Two hundred years or so after Christ--in the twilight of their glory and their gods--the Romans under Elagabalus brought the glory of Grecian architecture to Baalbec, named the place Heliopolis, and set up temples that were--and are--the wonder of the world.