In antiquity the whole of the lovely vale
appears to have been dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it is
haunted by his memory; for the heights which shut it in are crested
at various points by ruined monuments of his worship, some of them
overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns the head dizzy to
look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests far below. One
such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above a
roughly hewn recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and
Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack
of a bear, while she is seated in an attitude of sorrow. Her
grief-stricken figure may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the
Lebanon described by Macrobius, and the recess in the rock is
perhaps her lover's tomb. Every year, in the belief of his
worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains, and every
year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So
year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while
the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon,
and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the
blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous
band of crimson.
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