From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  As I sat there scribbling what I had just seen into my notebook, I heard a branch break behind me. Turning around with a start I saw a bearded old man in rough, dark robes staring at me from a grove of trees a short distance away. We stood looking at each other in silence for a second before, in a low voice, he said: 'Qui est la?'

  I introduced myself and asked him who he was.

  'Je suis le pere eremite,' he said, adding after a pause, 'Le dernier eremite dans Liban. Peut-etre le dernier eremite dans le Prochain Orient' A proud smile flashed momentarily across his face as he said this. 'Et vous? Vous etes Chretien? Catholique?'

  I nodded, and he beckoned me over. He held my hand and peered closely into my eyes. He was old and frail, with long fingers and very white skin, but he had a tremendously gentle face.

  ' Venez,' he said, and led the way up a narrow path overhung with trees and covered with pine needles and acorns. He pulled aside a rough wicket gate and led me towards his hermitage, a small stone hut built against the rockface and enclosing an old cave chapel. To one side stood a small but carefully tended olive grove.

  'My predecessor planted those trees in the time of the Ottomans,' said the hermit.

  He opened the door of the chapel and indicated that I should go in. Inside it was very cold, but candles flickered against the sanctuary icons, giving off a little reflected light.

  'For thirty-five, forty years there were no hermits at all,' said the old man. 'Now I am the only one.'

  'When did you begin?'

  'At the end of May 1982, on the day of Pentecost. Before that I was the Superior of the Monastery of St Antony at Koshaya, a little down the valley. But I asked for a dispensation from my duties as Abbot so I could become a hermit.' 'Why?'

  'It is a vocation. To be a hermit is the summit of the Christian life. Not everyone can do it. For me it was very difficult to separate from my brothers, to give up meat, to live on my own. Most of all it is difficult to pray the Maronite liturgies for hermits - the ancient hermit liturgies of Antioch - which ordain long prayers to perform every day.'

  'Very long?'

  'Well over eight hours every day. The hermit should be occupied all day with prayer and spiritual reading. According to the Rule of St Antony he is allowed only small breaks to tend his grapes and olives and vegetables. This life is not for everyone.'

  'Does it get easier?'

  'Every day is difficult. It is the same for all hermits. As you get closer to God your enemy attacks you more. Those who are content to live in sin do not suffer from the temptations of the Devil so badly as those who try to live with God. For a hermit temptation follows you all your life. But after a while you do feel you are making progress. You do feel you are drawing closer to God.'

  I asked why it was necessary to leave a monastery to achieve this, what benefit there was in isolation. In answer, the hermit pointed to a small icon of St Antony hanging on the chapel wall. 'The desert fathers had a saying, that just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled waters, so also the soul: unless it is clear of alien thoughts and distractions it is not possible to pray to God in contemplation. It is like two lovers. If they want to discuss their love they want to be alone. They do not want to sit in the middle of a crowd.'

  'Is it a happy life?'

  The old man considered for a second before answering. 'Yes. It is happy, but only because it is so difficult. That is why the satisfaction is so great when you succeed. The desert fathers had another saying. They said that being a hermit was like building a fire. At first it smokes and your eyes water, but later you get the desired result: after the smoke disperses, the light and the heat comes. So with hermits. In the beginning there is a struggle and a lot of work for those who wish to come near to God and to light the divine fire within themselves. At first they feel lonely and depressed. But after that there is the indescribable joy of feeling the presence of the Lord.'

  He paused and looked at me. Then he said: 'Of course there is smoke in every life: misunderstandings, difficulties. Everyone must carry the cross, not a cross made of wood, but the troubles of every day. Some people pretend they have no difficulties, but it is not true. Everyone has their troubles.'

  I thought of the troubles which had resounded all around the valley in which the hermit lived, and I asked him whether the war had impinged on his life at all.

  'No,' said the hermit. 'It did not come here. This is the Valley of the Saints. It is protected by God. I was never worried. Even though the Christians made many mistakes, I was not frightened. I knew we were still protected.'

  'Do you worry that so many Maronites have emigrated now? That they are now a minority in Lebanon?'

  'The others will come back, I hope. But that is politics. It is not my world. Whatever happens I will stay. I am a prisoner of God. I cannot leave this place.'

  Worried by the fading light, I said goodbye to the hermit and stumbled down the path to the track at the bottom. I walked along it in the gathering darkness until I saw a pair of headlights coming slowly towards me. It was Nouri, worried that I had got lost. Only after I got in and we were heading back towards Bsharre did I realise that I had never learned the hermit's name.

  Bsharre,9 October

  The Qanubbin Gorge was once famous for producing saints. Now it is more remarkable for the number of Christian warlords and mafiosi that spring from its soil.

  Bsharre claims Geagea; Zghorta, twenty miles further down the gorge, produced the Franjiehs, one of the most powerful clans of warlords in all Lebanon. Geagea is now awaiting trial, but the Franjiehs still live in great style in their feudal stronghold, where they mourn the memory of the greatest of their clansmen, Suleiman 'the Sphinx' Franjieh, mafia godfather, reputed mass murderer and one-time President of Lebanon.

  Tales of Suleiman Franjieh's enormities fill the annals of modern Lebanon. There are references to his boasting of the number of men he had personally killed (seven hundred according to one version), and to his policy of getting one of his toughs ostentatiously to shoot dead a Tripoli Muslim every month just to remind the townsmen who it was that controlled northern Lebanon. His most famous outrage took place as part of a vendetta with a rival Maronite clan, the Douaihys, who in his view were beginning to encroach on his political territory. The climax of this dispute saw Franjieh's gunmen massacring the Douaihy family while they were attending a requiem mass a short distance from Zghorta; witnesses claimed that Suleiman was himself one of the gunmen. Different versions of the story circulate, but all agree that a full-scale shootout took place during the funeral, with the gunmen of the rival clans blazing away at each other from behind pillars and inside confessionals; that several priests conducting the service were caught in the crossfire and killed; and that the Douaihy clan came off much the worst with at least twelve (and possibly as many as twenty) dead. Certainly at the end of it, warrants were issued for the arrest of forty-five Franjieh toughs, and Suleiman was forced to flee. He went to Syria, where he was sheltered by friends in the Alawi mountains. Their name was Asad, and Suleiman came to be specially friendly with one of them, a young air force officer named Hafez. Twelve years later, in 1970, long after Suleiman had been granted a pardon and allowed to return to Lebanon, Hafez al-Asad seized power in Damascus in a coup d'etat.

  By chance, the same year saw Suleiman elected to the Presidency of Lebanon. His election was reputedly pulled off only when his gunmen, smuggled into the parliament building with the complicity of a sympathetic policeman, enforced a vote in his favour by producing revolvers and turning them on the Speaker. In characteristic style, Suleiman Franjieh used his appointment to fill the Cabinet with his friends and relatives: the Mayor of Zghorta was suddenly promoted from organising flower shows to being Director of the Ministry of Information; Iskander Ghanem, a close personal friend, became Commander-in-Chief of the Army; while Tony Franjieh, Suleiman's eldest son, became the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications. Later, on the outbreak of war, Tony was put in charge of the Franjiehs' pe
rsonal Marada Militia, where he behaved with characteristic brutality: on one occasion three hundred Muslims were massacred in one day in the Matn region in revenge for four Maronites found slain. Tony continued in this way until, in typical Maronite fashion, he died as he had lived, dispatched by two rival Maronite leaders, Bashir Gemayel and Samir Geagea, in a night raid on the Franjieh summer palace.

  The story of the raid was remarkable, and revealed more clearly than anything the medieval feudal reality behind the civilised twentieth-century veneer of Lebanese politics. Just as Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party was really only a mechanism for the Druze to support their feudal lords, the Jumblatts, so the dispute between Gemayel, Geagea and Tony Franjieh, ostensibly a struggle for power between two rival Christian militias - the Gemayel-Geagea Phalange, which wanted to partition Lebanon into sectarian cantons, and the Franjiehs' Marada Militia which wished to keep it whole - in fact had its true roots in something more primitive still: a century-old blood feud between Bsharre, Geagea's home town, and Ehden and Zghorta, the Franjieh strongholds forty miles to the west.

  The feud was explained to me by Mr Ch'baat at the hotel this morning when he joined me for breakfast. 'Some time about one hundred years ago,' he said, 'a Geagea woman from Bsharre was breast-feeding her child in a village on the coast. Two horsemen from Ehden stopped by her house, and she gave them water and fed their horses. Rather than saying thank you, they killed her dog and threw it in the well. Then they tore the baby in two and shot the mother. When they heard this in Bsharre the priest began to ring the bells. The people gathered by the church and discussed what they should do. Eventually they hit on a plan.' 'What was that?' I asked.

  'They walked down to Ehden. They burned the town. Then they killed lots of people.' Ch'baat nodded his head approvingly. 'Since then the two towns have been enemies. There is a saying in Lebanon: "The enemy of my grandfather can never be my friend."'

  When I said I was going to visit Ehden that morning, Ch'baat raised his eyebrows. 'Be careful, then. In Bsharre we shoot you in the face, but in Ehden they shoot you in the back. We have a proverb: "You can eat in Ehden, but make sure you sleep in Bsharre. Sleep in Ehden, and they will shoot you while you are asleep."'

  Yet by all accounts, this was exactly what Gemayel and Geagea had done to Tony Franjieh on the night of their commando raid on Ehden. On 13 June 1978 Geagea amassed a thousand of his Phalange troops at Jounieh and drove up into the mountains at night. Another force of around two hundred came down from Bsharre. In all around 1,200 Phalangists were involved, all heavily armed with machine guns, cannons and rockets, moving in two convoys of open-topped jeeps.

  The diversionary force from Bsharre attacked first, just before four a.m., ambushing and killing the militia men woken by the first sounds of battle. This drew the defenders away from the centre of Ehden, leaving the Franjiehs' Summer Palace undefended. And it was on the Summer Palace, where Tony Franjieh lay sleeping, that Geagea directed the main Phalangist force. He led it into battle himself.

  The attack was over in less than a quarter of an hour. Quickly overcoming the few remaining guards, Geagea's force surrounded the building. There was a brief exchange of fire, during which Franjieh managed to wound Geagea severely in the shoulder, but the matter was quickly settled with a grenade. By the time the raiders withdrew, Tony Franjieh and his entire immediate family had been killed.

  I pointed out to Ch'baat that rousing a man from his bed and killing him and his family in their pyjamas hardly seemed to square with Bsharre's honourable tradition of shooting people awake and in the face, but he simply shrugged his shoulders. 'Geagea is a very honourable and very holy man,' he said. 'We are very proud of him in Bsharre.'

  I listed some more of the crimes I had heard Geagea accused of: as well as the killing of Tony Franjieh, the equally cowardly night murder of another Christian rival, Dany Chamoun and his wife and two small sons (twenty-seven bullets were pumped into the two children); the bombing of the church in Jounieh (apparently an attempt either to keep the Pope away or to persuade the international community that the Christians of Lebanon were being oppressed and terrorised by wicked Muslim extremists); the mass murder and terrorising of the Druze of the Chouf.

  'You must not believe what people say about Samir Geagea,' said Ch'baat.

  'But you can hardly call him holy.'

  'Certainly yes,' he said, quite serious. 'He went to mass every day and prayed by his bed every night. He had a church built wherever he was, wherever he fought. Every Christmas his troops expected money as a present, but instead he gave them prayer books and rosaries. Of course he went to confession every week. He never went into battle without his cross. In his office, he always had a picture of the Virgin and a cross: never any picture of Che Guevara or anything like that.'

  We left Bsharre at ten in the morning and took a winding mountain road down towards the north-west. It was a spectacular drive, snaking through the snowy hills and Alpine meadows towards the coastal plain and the blue haze of the coastline. Only the constant punctuation of Syrian army checkpoints hinted at the area's recent history of conflict.

  At Ehden a line of Syrian tanks was drawn up outside the French-built colonial post office with its Moorish arcade. I asked

  Nouri to take me to the scene of the attack, and we pulled up behind a middle-aged man at the outer gates of the Summer Palace to ask exact directions. He offered to conduct us himself. It was only when he got in that I noticed what it was that he was carrying: not an umbrella as I had at first thought, but a pump-action shotgun.

  'Are you a security guard or something?' I asked, alarmed.

  'No,' replied the man. 'I was going out shooting.'

  'Shooting what?'

  'Cats.'

  'Cats?'

  'Cats. I hate cats.' 'Why?'

  'Because,' said the man, 'I like dogs. I like powerful dogs. I have two dobermans at home.'

  He reflected on this for a second. 'Cats,' he added, 'are vermin.'

  Driving into the gates of the Franjiehs' Summer Palace, the doberman-lover directed us away from the main palace to a small bungalow that stood in the grounds.

  'This is where Tony was sleeping when they attacked,' he said.

  'Were you here at the time?' I asked.

  'No, I was in London. It was midsummer. Geagea only got away with the murder because everyone was away. There were a thousand of them and no one was here to protect Tony. A couple of guards, nothing more.'

  The man spat on the ground and pointed over to the gatehouse of the compound. 'They left their jeeps over there and came the final distance on foot. Geagea and his boss, Bashir Gemayel, were standing over there directing everything. Tony heard something and woke up in time to get to the kitchen and shoot six of them dead - and wound Geagea - before they blew him up with a grenade. Without their grenades they would never have been able to kill him.'

  The man fiddled angrily with the safety catch of his shotgun. 'They were cowards. After they killed Tony, they walked into the house and shot his wife, his daughter, the maid, even the dog. I didn't think a human being could do that. The girl was three years old; like an angel. Afterwards they found thirty bullets in her body and head. What kind of person could do that?' 'Wasn't there any resistance?'

  'Of course. When they heard the shooting, our people came rushing out of their houses to see what was happening. At the same time some reinforcements arrived from Zghorta. Many of the Phalangists were killed, even though most of our people were just armed with knives and shotguns. When they saw that Geagea was wounded the Phalange just ran away. Like cowards. They left their jeeps and machine guns and just ran. We were still hunting them down in the hills days afterwards.'

  The man led me over to the bungalow and pointed out the bulletholes around what he said had been the child's bedroom.

  'Most of them must have been taking drugs. Something like this no one can do if they are normal. You can kill someone who is three years old? No. No one can do this. Only
an animal. But if you take drugs you can. Maybe. Maybe then.'

  After all I had heard of the firepower of the different Christian warlords in the mountains, I carried on down to Zghorta half expecting that my lunch with the Franjiehs would be held in some sort of castellated mafia fortress. I could not have been more wrong.

  The surviving Franjiehs turned out to live in an elegant new neo-colonial villa, built sometime in the 1970s and surrounded by a thicket of rich green palms. I was conducted inside by an old retainer and left to wait amid the polychrome Moorish arches of a reception room. The walls were decorated with fans of Ottoman daggers and muskets, mounted fragments of Byzantine mosaic and fine Turkish kilims. Along the side of the room were lines of chairs, enough to sit maybe thirty or forty retainers coming to pay their respect to their feudal lord.

  No less surprising, when they finally appeared, were the

  Franjiehs themselves. Despite quite recently possessing a sizeable private army, indulging in bloody feuds and running one of the most powerful mafia-type networks in Lebanon, nothing said or done by my hosts indicated that they were anything but good-natured, wealthy provincial landowners of the sort you might be pleased to meet anywhere around the Mediterranean. Tony's younger brother Robert, my host, turned out to be gentle and artistic. I had been told by our mutual friend that he was a very different figure from his late father: a reluctant politician, he had voluntarily handed over control of the family's Marada Militia to his nephew, Tony's surviving son. Nevertheless I had certainly not expected such an intelligent and sympathetic figure. Nor was there anything at all sinister about his mother, the late Suleiman Fran-jieh's elderly widow. I sat next to her at lunch. She was bubbly and apparently sweet-natured, as were her two middle-aged daughters. As we sat around a huge table and course after course of meze were produced by a stream of bowing servants, Mme Franjieh made polite small talk about her visit to England.