Falls of the Abana

The town of az-Zabadānī has an elevation of nearly three thousand six hundred feet, and Blūdān, on the mountain above it, to the east, is a thousand feet higher, while the lofty peak of Anti- Lebanon, behind that village, rises to a height of more than seven thousand five hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean.

Blūdān is best known as the village where the British Consul of Damascus, the Irish and American missionaries, and a few merchants of that city spend the summer. It is beautifully situated on the mountain-side, facing the west, and surrounded by vineyards and gardens of fruit-trees, vegetables, and flowers. It is abundantly supplied with running streams and purling brooks, and, from its great elevation, commands a magnificent view of the plain beneath and the mountains beyond as far southward as Mount Ḥermon.

Having passed away from the borders of those fruitful gardens of az-Zabadānī, which have the neatest and best kept hedges in Syria, not excepting those of Damascus, we will now turn westward across the plain to the Baradā, and follow the left bank of that river to where it descends, through the eastern mountains, into the deep and narrow chasm of Sūq Wādī Baradā.

The river here appears to be deep, and its course swift and noiseless, as it goes on its winding way through the fields and meadows of this ever narrowing plain.

Farther on, near the ruins of an ancient bridge, it falls over a ledge of rocks in a series of beautiful cascades; and thence onwards to the pass west of the village of Sūq Wādī Baradā it is a tumultuous and roaring torrent. There we may rest awhile in the wild and romantic gorge and admire the grand and magnificent scenery almost unequalled even in this country.

These cliffs are in some places quite perpendicular, especially on the southern side of the gorge, and the mountains towering above them on our right are at least a thousand feet high.

William McClure Thomson, The Land and the Book, Vol. III, Lebanon, Damascus, and Beyond Jordan. Harper1886 (p. 348-349).