Instead Lowdermilk found an almost treeless waste: exhausted soil, untended ruins, scattered and scrubby vegetation, impoverished goatherds in “poverty, ignorance, and squalor,” “the Hanging Gardens of Babylon now heaps and piles in a salty desolation.” The Fertile Crescent was no longer fertile; the land of milk and honey had neither. Where once the mighty forests of Lebanon had provided wood for ships and cities across the Holy Land, only three small cedar groves remained, the largest with about four hundred trees.
