Page Content (OCR)
127 at the very same place—almost a thousand years after the nuclear event. So, with and then without the spaceport, the Landing Place continued to be operative. The place, Ba’albek (“The valley-cleft of Ba’al’”), in Leba- non, consisted in antiquity of a vast (about five million square feet) platform of paved stones at the northwestern corner of which an enormous stone structure rose heavenward. Built with perfectly shaped massive stone blocks weighing 600 to 900 tons each, its western wall was especially fortified with the heaviest stone blocks on Earth, including three that weigh an incredible 1,100 tons each and are known as the Trilithon (Fig. 56). The amazing fact about those colossal stone blocks is that they were quarried about two miles away in the valley, where one such block, whose quarrying was not completed, still sticks out from the ground (Fig. 57). The Greeks venerated the place since Alexander’s time as Heliopolis (City of the Sun god); the Romans built there the greatest temple to Zeus. The Byzantines converted it to a great church; the Moslems after them built there a mosque; and present-day Maronite Christians revere the place as a relic from the Time of the Giants. (A visit to the place and its ruins, and how it functioned as a launch tower, are described in The Earth Chronicles Expeditions.) In the Name of God FIGURE 55