From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  At Beirut, where the pair went to finish their legal studies sometime in the 480s, things were little better. Though there appeared to be fewer pagans around than in Alexandria, the rich students indulged in all manner of pleasures repugnant to a puritanical Christian like Zacharias: there was a theatre and a circus, while in the evening there were dice games and drinking with dancing girls and prostitutes. This hedonism caused a reaction among the more pious students, rather in the way the excesses of Beirut's wild and salacious nightlife during the 1960s and seventies provoked, a decade later, the puritanism of Islamic Jihad. In response to the law students' orgiastic behaviour, the more zealous of the Christian activists formed religious brotherhoods, urging Zacharias and Severus to attend church every evening, to avoid the theatre and to follow the famous advice of St Jerome that 'he who has bathed in Christ [i.e. been baptised] does not need a second bath': giving the lead, the head of the brotherhood apparently used to wash only once a year.

  As in Alexandria, there were scandals involving the occult. The lodgings of the chief suspect were searched, his grimoires confiscated, his magical books burned and his friends denounced to the bishop. One of the accused, Chrysaorius of Tralles, then tried to escape. He rented a ship, loaded it with his books of spells, his concubine and children; they set sail, but soon sank (as ships carrying magicians have a tendency to do in pious Byzantine literature: there are several similar stories involving wicked pagans and magicians coming to damp ends on the high seas in the pages of The Spiritual Meadow).

  John Moschos seems to have passed fairly quickly up the coast of what was then Byzantine Phoenicia. Indeed he mentions only three places within the boundaries of modern Lebanon: Tyre, Porphyreon and Ba'albek. Byzantine Beirut he does not refer to at all, perhaps because by the late sixth century the city was in serious decline. This was partly the result of the bankruptcy of the local silk industry, when many of the silk merchants were forced to migrate to Persia in search of work, and partly due to a severe earthquake in 551 - the last of a series of ominous tremors throughout the early sixth century - which brought down many of the city's buildings. Indeed the evidence of another contemporary traveller, the Italian pilgrim Antonius Martyr, seems to indicate that in 570 'the school of letters' (presumably the law school) had completely ceased to function, and the only place on the Lebanese coast where Antonius saw any prosperity was Beirut's great rival, Tyre. There he reported that the city's looms were still operating, while its brothels were apparently packed to bursting.

  I had asked Professor Salibi about rumours I had heard in Damascus, that the remains of Byzantine Beirut had been turning up during demolition work for the Downtown Project. He in turn had put me in touch with Leila Badr, one of archaeologists at the American University who had been involved in the digging.

  Dr Badr confirmed that in the rescue excavations which had taken place during the demolitions, the diggers had indeed struck Byzantine levels and managed to uncover long stretches of the Byzantine, Roman and Phoenician town walls, all of which followed roughly the same course. There was not a great deal to see, but it was an important discovery: previously no one had known the boundaries of the ancient town. Some badly preserved fragments of Byzantine floor mosaics had also been found, but these had been sent away for conservation and I wouldn't be able to see them. But, said Dr Badr, there were some other recently-discovered Byzantine remains that I should definitely try to look at.

  Apparently just before the Israeli invasion, in early 1982, workmen digging in the sand dunes on the coast at Jiyyeh, twenty miles to the south of Beirut, had stumbled upon a series of well-preserved Byzantine monastic ruins: churches, hostels, halls and agricultural buildings. Inside was a collection of the most remarkable mosaics, many with dated Greek inscriptions. These identified the site as the Byzantine port of Porphyreon, one of the three Lebanese cities visited by Moschos.

  Moschos tells two stories about the port. One concerns the companion of his friend, the hermit Abba Zosimos the Cilician, who was bitten by a snake and 'died immediately with blood flowing from all his members'. The other is the tale of Procopius the lawyer, who is away in Jerusalem when he hears that the plague has broken out in his home town. Terrified for the safety of his children, he goes to see the renowned Byzantine holy man Abba Zachaios, and tells him of his fear.

  When [Abba Zachaios] heard this, he turned towards the east and continued reaching up to heaven for about two hours without saying a word. Then he turned towards me and said: 'Take heart and do not be distraught: your children shall not die in the plague. In fact two days from now, the plague shall abate.' And indeed it came about as the elder foretold.

  The recent excavations apparently confirmed Moschos's report that Porphyreon was a major port in the late sixth century. It was probably as large as its rival Beirut, and specialised in olive oil production and textile manufacture, and also, as was indicated by its name, in the making of purple dye. Despite the economic crisis plaguing Antioch and much of the rest of the Levantine coast,

  Porphyreon was clearly still a very prosperous place, and its monastic buildings had once been magnificent.

  Almost all the antiquities discovered in Lebanon during the civil war were exported illegally and sold on the black market in Europe and America. At one point things got so bad that in Tyre militiamen were blowing open sarcophagi with dynamite to get at the grave-goods within. But by good fortune Jiyyeh fell within the sphere of influence of Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader. Jumblatt was a history scholar before turning politician, and almost alone of Lebanese warlords had a sense of the past and understood the importance of a country's archaeological heritage. Dr Badr told me that Jumblatt had kept the mosaics safe during the war, and had recently brought them out and placed them in his palace at Beit ed-Din in the Chouf. The only problem, she said, was that I would need Jumblatt's permission if I was to get in to see them.

  Following Dr Badr's instructions, I duly set off in a taxi to the offices of Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party. This organisation was, by all accounts, neither progressive nor socialist; rather it was a sort of glorified feudal support group through which Lebanon's Druze were enabled to pledge their allegiance to their tribal chieftain, W. Jumblatt. The office was a suitably rackety-looking place, riddled with the regulation Beirut bulletholes, but I climbed the dingy stairs and at the top almost ran into Jumblatt and his squad of bodyguards.

  Jumblatt had the appearance less of a ruthless warlord than of a left-wing Sorbonne sociology don from the barricades of 1968. He was an unexpectedly tall and commanding figure in his late forties, balding, with a large nose and a droopy Mexican moustache. He wore a black leather jacket and tight black jeans, and he spoke fluent English.

  It turned out that I had been very lucky. Jumblatt was leaving for France in less than an hour, but agreed to see me for five minutes before he left. Armed Druze flunkies frisked me then ushered me into a study. After twenty minutes Jumblatt walked in and asked how he could help. I explained what I wanted, and he immediately gave his permission.

  'Go ahead. Tell my men at the gate that you are my guest. They will show you the mosaics.' Then he added, 'It's so rare to see English writers in Beirut these days. You know Charles Glass?'

  'Very well.'

  'How is he? Still alive?'

  'Becoming rather a playboy in his old age, by all accounts.'

  'The Hezbollah should never have let him escape from his captivity,' he said. 'You know he was kidnapped on his way to see me? What about David Gilmour? The last time I was in London he took me to lunch at the Travellers' Club. What's he doing now?'

  'He's just written a book on Lord Curzon.'

  'David always was an unreconstructed imperialist,' said Jum-blatt. 'But tell me,' he asked politely, 'what are you writing about?'

  I explained that I was researching a book about the Middle Eastern Christians, and Jumblatt raised his eyebrows: during the war he had been one of the most formidable enemies of the Christian militias
. Despite the fact that the Christian forces were supported by both Israel and the Americans, Jumblatt's forces had managed to drive the Christian militias out of the Druze heartlands in the Chouf, and in the process had gained a reputation for savage tenacity. The Druze, it was well known, seldom took prisoners.

  'The Maronites have always been their own worst enemies,' said Jumblatt. 'They have always wanted to dominate Lebanon as if it were an entirely Christian state. They have never been prepared to give the majority their rights, to share power or in any way to bring about democratic reforms.'

  'I understand you were no friend of the Phalangists during the war.'

  'The Phalange was a fascist organisation founded by Pierre Gemayel after a visit to Nazi Germany in 1936,' he said, with indisputable historical accuracy. 'When they started committing atrocities - slitting the throats of three hundred Muslims at roadblocks on Black Saturday in 1975, or massacring the Palestinians in the camp at Tel el-Za'atar a year later - we had to respond. Coexistence is only possible if the Maronites resist their more extreme right-wing tendencies.'

  'So are you pessimistic about the future?'

  'Lebanon is an artificial creation,' replied Jumblatt. 'It was created by the French in 1920. Economically and politically speaking it has no future on its own. We need the Arabs. We are the gateway to the Arab world: that is our natural environment. We are not some part of the French dominions, or the Vatican, or whatever it is the Maronites want. If they accept this, then maybe this peace will hold.'

  One of Jumblatt's aides came in to say that his car was ready to take him to the airport. Jumblatt pulled himself out of his chair. 'I will miss my plane,' he said. 'I'm sorry. I hope you get to see your mosaics.'

  As we walked down the stairs together Jumblatt made some remark about the civil war, and I asked him whether he thought that in retrospect it could have been avoided altogether.

  'If the Maronites had been less intransigent,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'Then maybe ... But the ifs of history: if Cleopatra's nose had been one inch longer,' he said, 'would Antony have lost the battle of Actium?'

  The road to the Chouf led through the squalid southern suburbs of Beirut. Thirty years ago, this road bordered Ouzayeh Beach. It was once the Ipanema of Beirut, the favourite playground of le tout Beirut. Now it is Hezbollah territory, and a vast meandering shanty-slum of tin sheds and breezeblock huts, cheap restaurants and rundown bakeries lines the strip between the road and the now almost invisible beach.

  On the central reservation, running between the two lanes of the road, rose a series of giant hoardings depicting the hugely enlarged features of a line of Iranian mullahs. Each cleric stared out blankly through heavy Joe-90 spectacles, under a tightly wrapped and immaculately starched white turban: as strange and surreal a sight as a line of giant Andy Warhol Marilyns raised above a motorway. Interspersed between the mullahs, much smaller and crudely nailed onto a low picket of wooden posts, stretched a line of idealised portraits of smiling, bearded shaheedin, the Hezbollah 'martyrs' who had died fighting the Israelis in occupied southern Lebanon. To indicate the heavenly bliss currently being enjoyed by these fighters, their heads were sometimes shown floating on clouds of white cumulus. Other hoardings showed the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, inscribed with a series of fearsome invocations to Free Palestine and Crush the Zionist Entity, along with other varieties of the sort of bloodcurdling threats, promises and admonitions which Shia fundamentalists like to read as they drive into town to do their shopping.

  It had turned wet and windy, and each time the taxi dived into one of the deep brown puddles that filled the potholes in the road, an explosion of muddy water splashed over the bonnet and windscreen. As we bounced along, past tumbledown garages, scrapyards and tyre shops, I could see thickly bearded Hezbollah men pottering around with spanners under the bonnets of battered, shrapnel-shattered Datsuns or war-weary Volvos; others were holding pots of paint and paintbrushes with which they dabbed on splashes of colour here and there in an attempt to distract attention from the dents and bulletholes that dotted their cars' chassis. I remarked to the taxi driver, Nouri Suleiman, that I had expected somewhat higher-calibre weapons than sprayguns from these men.

  'Guns are not so useful now we are at peace,' he replied. 'At the end of the war a new M-16 used to cost $1,000. Now you can buy one for $100. A pistol used to be $500. Now it's down to $150.'

  'So a pistol is now more expensive than an M-16?' 'That's because people still like to have small guns,' replied Nouri. 'Why?'

  'They're useful. You can't hide an M-16, but it's easy to hide a pistol. Put it in your pocket or a briefcase. No problem.'

  From the back of his glove compartment he whipped out a small snub-nosed pistol and showed it to me: 'You see? Easy to hide. No problem.'

  We drove on through the uncontrolled ribbon of Beirut's rambling southern suburbs, past the sad, huddled slums belonging to the landless Shias and the barbed wire and collapsing shanties of various miserable-looking Palestinian refugee camps. Half an hour later we arrived at the outskirts of Damour, the Christian town that had suffered most severely in the civil war. First it was attacked and pillaged by the Palestinians in revenge for Maronite atrocities against them in Beirut. Most of the inhabitants escaped by sea, but 350 remained in their homes. When Arafat's gunmen stormed into the town on 20 January 1976, the Fatah guerrillas machine-gunned the men, raped the women and dynamited the houses. It was then that the Palestinians, apparently dissatisfied at having had the chance to wreak revenge on so few living Maronites, hit upon the idea of exhuming their dead and scattering the cadavers around the ruins of the town they had just desecrated. Later on, the town was captured and destroyed a second time, on this occasion by the Israelis, before being resettled on their departure by the Druze. Jumblatt now keeps his principal office in Damour. But there are no Christians living here any more.

  We drove quickly through what was left of the town: a few houses, all riddled with bullet and shrapnel holes; the odd ruin of a sixties bungalow, now overgrown with vines and creepers; a scrappy plantation of banana palms; a few old Druze men sitting around on their covered verandahs looking out into the drizzle in their white keffiyehs and baggy black shalwar pantaloons. We then took a left turn and began winding upwards into the steep, thickly-wooded slopes that led into the Chouf.

  It was raining hard now, and the gleaming road was slippery with fallen leaves. Cars coming down from Beit ed-Din sluiced past us, windscreen wipers on full. Low cloud obscured the tops of the mountain peaks rising above us; below, the valleys fell away in a steep precipice of abandoned cultivation terraces and balding beech trees, their few remaining leaves turning bright autumnal yellow. For the final twenty minutes of the journey, as on the way into Beirut, we found ourselves crawling uphill behind another pair of the ubiquitous Syrian tank-transporters, each weighed down with its cargo of two Soviet T-72 battle tanks. Looking at

  the map, I realised that the Israeli Occupation Zone, the current front line between the armies of the Jewish state and the local Hezbollah guerrillas, lay only twelve miles to the south.

  At the top of the mountain, in Deir el-Qamar, the driver stopped to fill up with petrol and to let his battered radiator cool down. Deir el-Qamar was a fine medieval town and, uniquely in Lebanon, had been well preserved, thanks to Walid Jumblatt's interest in conservation. It was built of warm honey-coloured sandstone and was full of old Ottoman khans and churches, lovely even in the rain. As I sat in a cafe, warming my hands around a glass of tea, I caught sight of a Maronite priest in black cloak and biretta hurrying along the road outside, a bent figure scurrying under the shelter of a wide umbrella. I had understood that the Christians of the Chouf, like those of Damour, had been driven out of the area during the fighting. Surprised, I chased after the priest and invited him into the cafe to join me. Clearly as amazed to see me as I was to see him, Pere Abbe Marcel abi-Khalil accepted.

  The old priest shook his wet umbrella and folded it up. 'B
efore the fighting,' he said, 'Deir el-Qamar was half Christian and half Druze. The Chouf was traditionally a Druze area, but the Maron-ites began to migrate here from the north in the eighteenth century. By 1975, before the fighting, there must have been five thousand Christians living here, maybe twice that number in summer.'

  He sipped his tea. 'Then there was the War of the Mountains,' he said, 'and all the Christians left. Today there are no more than one thousand of us living here.'

  'So some Christians have returned?'

  'Yes. They've started trickling back. Jumblatt is giving them a little money to help them start again. He is a good man. He has suffered himself - his father was assassinated - so he knows what it is to suffer loss. He wants to heal the wounds.'

  'I'm surprised to hear a Maronite say that.'

  'In 1860 the Druze and the Christians fought each other, but from then until the war we lived happily side by side. In our school we used to have 150 Christians and 350 Druze.'

  'Druze? In a Christian school?'

  'Mais oui,' said Fr. Marcel. 'The fathers taught everyone, whatever their religion.'

  'So what went wrong during the war?'

  'It was Geagea and his Phalange. Before he came to the Chouf, we had lived together peacefully for generations. But while the Israelis were here in 1982, Geagea's men fought against the Druze in the Chouf and in Sidon. Geagea treated the Druze very badly. He made many murders. The Israelis pretended not to see and let Geagea do what he wanted. As a result, when they withdrew, everyone attacked the Christians. We were besieged and for three months there was nothing to eat: only grass. The Red Cross sent food but the Druze ate it on the way. In the end the Syrians supported Jumblatt and Geagea lost his war. Because of what he did, the Christians were expelled from both here and Sidon. We have a saying: "Where Geagea sets foot, no Christian remains." With a champion like him, we need no other enemies.'