From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  'We had to sell the Guercino to the Met,' she said. 'It was painted for one of my ancestors, but the Syrians were shelling and we were left with no money at all. Couldn't even pay the servants. I panicked and sold it for a fraction of its worth.'

  'And this?' I asked, pointing to a Venetian canalscape. 'Canaletto?'

  'No,' she said. 'It's Guardi. But it's nice, isn't it?'

  Outside the door of the sitting room my hostess paused by a small Baroque table with finely carved ball-and-claw feet. On it were displayed a few lumps of twisted metal.

  'And these,' I said. 'Giacometti?'

  'No, no,' said Lady Cochrane. 'Those are shells. All of that lot landed inside the house. Those ones on the left are mortars: used to come whizzing through the house six at a time. Made a terrible racket. We keep them just to remind us what we went through.'

  We sat at a table and Lady Cochrane called for coffee. She then talked about her views on the redevelopment of Beirut: how the town had once been a green Ottoman garden city and should now be trying to return to that ideal rather than aiming at a sort of Middle Eastern version of Hong Kong, all high-rise blocks and plate glass. The brutalist architecture, she believed, was partly responsible for the brutalisation of Lebanon.

  'In the past rich and poor had their own green space,' she said. 'A workman had something to look forward to: a peaceful evening sitting with his family round a small fountain surrounded by sweet-smelling herbs. Now he comes back to a concrete box in a slum. His children are screaming, the television is blaring. It's no wonder the Lebanese turned somewhat irritable and aggressive during the 1970s.'

  A servant padded in with a tray of coffee. Lady Cochrane poured me a cup. In the background a telephone rang and a minute later the servant reappeared and whispered into his mistress's ear. She smiled a broad smile

  'Good, good,' she said. 'That was my lawyer. He's rung to say my neighbour has just received the order to stop building in my garden. Ah, but life is so trying these days! The Lebanese who are even remotely civilised are now reduced to a tiny minority. Before the civil war there was an artistic life: painters, musicians, actors. Now there is a terrible exodus of brains and honest people - the best Lebanese, Christian and Muslim, have all left, or are in the process of leaving. Among the Maronites 300,000 - a third of the total community - fled the Middle East in the course of the war. We're left with the bottom of the barrel.'

  'Are you a Maronite?'

  'I'm Greek Orthodox,' said Lady Cochrane. 'My family were Byzantines from Constantinople: the name Sursock is a corruption of Kyrie Isaac, Lord Isaac. They left at the fall of the city in 1453 and settled near J'bail.'

  I asked how much responsibility she thought the Maronites had to bear for what had happened to Lebanon.

  'The Maronites presided over both the birth and the death of Lebanon,' said Lady Cochrane. 'Without them, Lebanon would never have existed. With them behaving as they have a tendency to do, it can't go on. Of course, the war brought out the worst in everyone. The Muslims all turned into terrorists and the Christians into mafiosi: kidnapping and robbing people, protection rackets and so on. At the beginning they were so brave and honourable: we willingly gave them money, and even our own sons. But by the end we refused: it was just people like Geagea. Gangsters.'

  'I'm off to Geagea territory - Bsharre - this afternoon.'

  'Well, you be careful,' said Lady Cochrane briskly.

  'What do you mean?'

  'During the war my son Alfred went up there to see some friends. On the road, he was stopped by the Marada militia. They put a gun to his head and tied him to a tree. When Alfred was at Eton he quickly learned how to get out of beatings, and this experience came in very handy on this occasion. They said they were going to execute him. He kept telling them he was great friends with the Franjiehs - the ex-President's family who commanded the militia - and said that he was going to spend the weekend with them. Of course he had no such plans, but the lie eventually did the trick. Most of the militia men did not believe him, but Alfred kept going on about his important Maronite friends and eventually one of them got cold feet. The others were saying, "Let's just shoot him and ask questions afterwards," but the one with cold feet said, "No, we must telephone the Franjiehs and check what he's saying." So they did.

  'Luckily they got the former President, Suleiman Franjieh. He was a little surprised to hear that Alfred thought he had been invited for the weekend, but he told the militiamen to release Alfred immediately nonetheless. The next day Robert Franjieh, the President's son, rang up here. He and Alfred had known each other since they were in playpens together: it's a very small world here in Lebanon. Robert said: "I'm so sorry, Alfred. Rotten luck. Won't you come to lunch?"'

  'And what was Alfred's reply?'

  'He said, "Thanks a lot, Robert, but not today. I'm afraid I'm a little busy."'

  Oddly enough, before I left England a journalist friend had given me Robert Franjieh's number. Intrigued by Lady Cochrane's story, before I left Beirut for Bsharre I gave him a ring and received an invitation to lunch later in the week. Unlike Alfred, I accepted.

  The main road north from Beirut hugged the coast. The cliffs of the mountains rose steeply to our right while a ribbon of new seafront high-rise blocks towered to the left. We headed past the harbour with its phalanx of bulldozers pushing great piles of rubble and tangles of reinforced concrete into the sea, then crawled slowly through a long traffic jam past the casinos, nightclubs and restaurants of Jounieh. A little to the north we passed along a small stretch of six-lane motorway elaborately decorated with strange road-markings and numbers. As none of Lebanon's roads normally have any markings at all (or, indeed, traffic lights, signposts or lighting for that matter), I was baffled by the complex network of characters and symbols, and asked Nouri what they were.

  'They were for the planes, sir.'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'Aeroplanes, sir. During the war, when Beirut airport was on the front line, the air force moved here. This side was the main runway, while the other lane was where the planes were parked.'

  Just after Jebail, once famous across the Mediterranean for its orgiastic worship of Astarte, we turned inland, driving up into a dark and narrow river valley, barren but for a thin covering of thorn and gorse. The gradient became steeper. Soon the valley had grown into a great gash, slicing through the landscape with near-vertical cliffs rising on either side of us; on some small ledges, cowering under the weight of strata, you could see the old rock chapels of the early Maronite hermits, some of which - the more accessible ones - had later been dignified with simple facades. Others, stranded high above the abyss and apparently reachable only by rope, gaped out of the cliff-face like yawning mouths.

  It was a strange, tortured geology that played around us: the ancient beds of rock were ripped, twisted and contorted like a body turning on a rack. The further we climbed, the deeper the gorge below us sunk until we found ourselves winding along on a narrow road above a dark drop. There were no crash-barriers. Occasionally a small village with a stone chapel would appear, clinging to the ledges between us and the chasm, but as we rose these became more infrequent and increasingly primitive. It grew chilly, and before long we passed the snowline: at first just a soft dusting of snow caught in the shade of the ridges and the old cultivation terraces, then, as we climbed, a thicker covering burying the pavements and masking the slates on the roofs. Our pace dropped to a crawl.

  Then, on a remote turning, several miles from the nearest house, we suddenly came upon a roadblock. It was manned by a picket of cold Syrian paratroopers; to one side stood a pair of plainclothes mukhabarat. Nouri wound down his window and answered a long series of questions put to him by the secret policemen. Eventually we were waved through, and I asked him what he had been questioned about.

  'They asked who you were. Then they asked me about myself.' 'What did you tell them?'

  'I said I am Nouri Suleiman, sportsman and swimming champion. I told them I swam the E
nglish Channel twice and said that they could ask anyone in Beirut: everyone there knew what I had done. The Syrian said he was a sportsman too. Then I told him that in 1953 I drove Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner to Ba'albek.'

  'What did he say to that?'

  'He said: "Who's Frank Sinatra?"'

  We drove on in the fading winter light, still snaking upwards, higher and higher into the Qadisha Valley. At some bends in the road, silhouetted against the snow, we passed shrines to the Virgin, each one topped with a small wire cross. No one was about and a chill wind was blowing, yet candles were burning outside most of these shrines, lit by figures unseen and casting flickering shadows over the statues within.

  The snow was lying thickly over everything now and the villages we passed through were strangely silent, with closed shutters and empty streets. They had all been summer resorts for the Beirut rich, said Nouri, but the rich had left the country and no one came up here any more. The towns had been out of season for nearly twenty years.

  Bsharre sat at the end of the valley, strung out along the edge of the chasm. After two decades of war there was only one hotel left in what had once been Lebanon's premier skiing resort. It was shuttered and darkened; only after ten minutes of hammering did we manage to rouse the caretaker. He let us in, then disappeared, leaving us in total darkness while he went off with his torch to get the diesel generator going. After the lights had eventually flickered on we were taken upstairs by the disbelieving owner. He said he had not had any visitors for a month, and no foreign guests for four years.

  At first the hotel was almost unbearably cold, but within half an hour Mr Ch'baat had built a blazing log fire in the grate downstairs, while his wife prepared some hot soup for Nouri and myself. I went to bed soon afterwards with my diary, two hot-water bottles and half a bottle of whisky. I drank it propped up in bed, fully clothed, under two feet of blankets and eiderdowns.

  Bsharre, 5 October

  Light streaming in through the curtainless windows woke me early this morning. It had dawned a bright, clear winter's day. Pulling on my jacket, I walked out onto the balcony to take in the view.

  Our arrival in the dark had given no hint of Bsharre's astonishing position. It was huddled on a narrow ledge between high snow peaks and the dark abyss of the Qadisha Valley. Stone houses with red roofs stretched out along the edge of the cliff in either direction, broken occasionally by the twin towers of a Maronite church. All the churches and chapels were built in the same French colonial mock-Gothic style; indeed the whole town had an inescapably French feel, like some remote Auvergne spa in the depths of winter. Only the extraordinary drama of the geology placed the scene firmly in Asia rather than Europe.

  I drank a cup of thick Turkish coffee by the fire in the dining room. Then, leaving a note for Nouri to come and pick me up at the bottom of the valley later that afternoon, I set off on foot for Qadisha, the sacred valley of the Maronites.

  The streets of Bsharre were clogged with the snow that had fallen during the night, and the town's traders were out in force, clearing the pavements outside their shops. I followed the road out of town around the edge of the precipice, past the tail of the gorge. To one side stood an orchard, its trees heavy with hard, cold apples. There I left the road and clambered down a steep track. It corkscrewed sharply downwards along the face of the cliff, curling around the jagged contours of the precipice in a series of dizzy hairpin bends. Halfway down I found three woodcutters smoking cigarettes on a treetrunk by the side of the road; pointing down the valley towards the sea they gave me directions to the old patriarchate. It lay four miles down the gorge, they said. All I had to do was to follow the river along the bottom of the valley; sooner or later it would lead me to my destination.

  The bottom of the valley was cold and damp in the way that only places never reached by the sun can be cold and damp. The rock of the cliff-face blossomed with a thick beard of moss and strange grey lichens. An untended herd of long-haired goats were nibbling the grass in a small water-meadow by the river; high above, the fire-blackened caves of early medieval hermits hung like swallows' nests beneath overhangs in the rock.

  The track passed between the muddy brown river and the rock-face, with a tangle of snow-covered thorns and creepers, vines and aerial roots hanging between the two and occasionally brushing my face as I passed. Every so often the terracing on the far side of the valley would be broken by the platform of a house, but always these were shuttered up and deserted. After a mile or so I passed the carcass of a small goat. Its front half was perfectly preserved, but its back had been eaten away, perhaps by a dog or a large bird of prey. Blood stained the slush all around it. The valley was dark and damp and eerily quiet. The sheer cliff-faces loomed on either side. I quickened my pace.

  Eventually, after a four-mile walk, I came to a makeshift sign on which had been crudely scribbled an arrow and the message: SILENCE! PRIERE! I left the track in the direction indicated and followed a small path that led up to the right, through a thicket of firs and poplars. There, just a hundred yards from the track, in the shadow of a large fig tree, stood the old Maronite Patriarchate. It was partly built into the face of the cliff and surrounded by a scattering of modest stone buildings: a range of cells, a church, some workshops, a kitchen building and a bell tower. Like everything else in the valley it was shuttered, silent and strangely sinister. The only sign of life was a single outsized lizard which shot into a crack in the wall as I climbed up the steps to the cells.

  This then was the cold heart of the Maronite world: an abbey said to have been founded by the fourth-century Byzantine Emperor Theodosius the Great, then for a thousand years the hidden Patriarchate of a persecuted (and in Byzantine eyes heretical) Church. Suitably inaccessible for a church on the defensive, Qanubbin's remoteness came to be an obstacle as the Maronites' power grew throughout the eighteenth century, and in 1820 it lost its primacy to the abbey at Bkerke on the cliffs above Beirut. It was finally deserted in the early years of the twentieth century. It is still a sacred site to the Maronites, yet no one seems to come here now, and its doors are all locked and bolted, perhaps to prevent one of the Maronites' many enemies from desecrating their most holy relics.

  Disconsolate at finding everything shut up after so long a walk, I rattled irritably on the various doors around the compound. Just as I was about to give up, I noticed a narrow flight of stairs running up the outside wall of a chapel, and found that from the top step I could reach a window whose shutters had been left open. Pulling myself up, I balanced on the window frame and looked down into the unlit interior.

  Inside it was pitch dark, but for the faint illumination of the light admitted by the one window. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I began to be able to make out a vaulted semi-subterranean chamber, around whose walls were scattered some large objects of ecclesiastical lumber. After the long walk down the cliffs and through the valley I felt I had an obligation to be inquisitive. So, mouthing a prayer, I jumped down into the night-blackness of the crypt.

  I fell through the darkness for fifteen feet and landed badly on the mud floor. When I had got my breath back I groped around the walls, but there were no light switches, and the doors turned out to be locked rather than bolted. I could not open them and

  so remained trapped in the darkness, a darkness which grew still more intense when, with a creak, a gust of wind blew one of the two shutters of my window closed.

  Slowly, however, my eyes got used even to this deep gloom, and I felt my way over to an object that turned out to be a large metal candle-stand. It contained a bed of waxy sand where a line of votive candles had guttered. Next to the stand was a broken white cross; and beyond that, in the centre of the room, a low rectangular chest on four squat legs. It was flanked on either side by two brass-topped candle-holders on wooden stands. The chest had a glass top and looked rather like an old-fashioned museum display-case, except that it was much lower. I went over and, wiping away a thin lint of cobwebs, peered through the glass t
o see if I could make out what was contained within.

  Near the far end of the case were laid out some clerical vestments of finely patterned lace, above which had been placed a glinting stole of cloth-of-gold. The lace was slightly crumpled, and bringing my face closer to the glass I noticed what looked like a stick poking out from the bottom. Then I realised it was a leg bone, and it finally dawned on me what I was looking at.

  At the top of the glass coffin, through a gauze veil, I found myself staring at the mummified face of a long-dead Maronite Patriarch. He was still crowned with his gilded mitre, and his gaunt face was turned slightly on its side, so that his features caught the light from the window. His skin had the consistency of old leather. It was hard and cracked, pitted with small tears and holes, yet every feature was still perfectly preserved: the high cheekbones, the left ear flat and shrivelled like an old buckle, the lips thin and slightly parted, revealing an unsettling line of grinning white teeth.

  Then, distantly, from far away in Bsharre, I heard a peal of bells calling the angelus. The noise woke me from my daze and reminded me how imminent was the coming night. I stumbled over to the wall and found to my relief that the stone was pitted with enough cracks and hand-holds to allow me to climb out of the crypt. Two minutes later I emerged blinking into the open. Already it was late afternoon and I had, I calculated, less than an hour to get up the cliff and out into the valley before darkness fell. Wiping the cobwebs from my hands on my trouser legs, I willed myself not to run, but soon found myself stumbling rapidly down the bank to the track.

  At first I jogged back along the path, anxious to get up the cliff and out of the valley before the onset of darkness. But after a quarter of an hour I was exhausted, and decided to take a rest on an old treetrunk beside the road.