From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  'Oh, Monsieur William,' she said in a strong French accent as she poured me some arak, 'when I was a little girl in Alexandria all I wanted to hear was the sound of your Big Ben. So famous, so celebre - le Ding of Big Ben: we schoolgirls talked of little else. Now of course they have mended it, and it is not the same. They tried to arrange it but what could they do? When my late husband was President we went to visit Bristol and le Longleat: so beautiful. We have nothing like this in Liban or in Egypt. And your Royal family. Oh! La Reine d'Angleterre: so serene. How can her son write this book and say the bad thing about the Due d'Edinbourg’. I used to like the Prince Charles, but now...'

  The highlight of Mme Franjieh's life - judging by the number of times her conversation returned to the subject - was the time she and her husband attended the Shah of Iran's famous levee at Persepolis in 1970, ostensibly to mark the twenty-fifth centenary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great.

  'The Shah! Such a charming man. So handsome! Such manners! So many charming people were there at the Shah's party: la Prin-cesse Anne (what elegance!), Monsieur Tito (so big a man!), Monsieur Bhutto and his beautiful wife, Mrs Asad {maladroite et tres silencieuse), Mrs Sadat (never stopped talking) ... In those days the politicians were more sophisticated, I think. This Clinton -he is like a performing monkey, non7. He has not got down from his tree. Of course, as I was brought up in Alexandria so I was used to cosmopolitan society. Oh! In my youth in Alexandria: everyone was there: les Grecs! Les Juifs! Les Anglais! The dances! The beautiful hotels! The Cecil, The Windsor, Le Metropole ... Une glace au chocolat at the Groppi! Oh! Of course in those days children respected their parents. We always waited for our parents to finish their ice before we began ours. Qu'est-ce que tu veux, Maman! Oui Maman! Non Maman! But these days. The young. Other than my darling Robert, Robert who is martyred by his mother, isn't that right, mon petit?’

  Afterwards, when Mme Franjieh had stopped talking, the ladies departed for their siesta. I was left alone chatting with Robert.

  'I was at university when the war broke out,' he said at one stage, breaking into the small talk. 'I was studying to be an architect. All I wanted to do was to start my life. Then suddenly this strange mentality developed: everything became polarised into Christian versus Muslim. All my life I had never asked anyone whether he was a Christian or not. Then quite suddenly you had to give up half your life: half your friends, half the places you knew. I still have more Muslim friends than Christian ones. When the war broke out, I suddenly could not see them, could not speak to them.

  'It was amazing to see how the hysteria evolved. In 1969 you began to see lines of friends from a street in Zghorta being drilled: lines of old butchers and grocers learning how to hold a rifle or fire a mortar. Perhaps one guy from the town had been in the army, and he would be there instructing all the old farmers.'

  'It must all seem very distant now.'

  'No,' said Robert. 'The war lives on. Everything in my life - everything in Lebanon - has been marked by that boundary: everything is either before or after the war. It has changed and brutalised everything. When I was young, if someone died from cancer or an accident, people would stop talking about it when I came into the room. Now I see friends talking about death in front of their children as if they were talking about bread or wine. During the war most people in this country ceased to make an effort, to work or to study: they knew they could be dead the next day, so they lived for the moment. It is the same today. In fact it may be the only thing people have learned from the war.'

  He sipped his coffee. 'To be honest with you, I don't like to think about the war. I try to forget it, but you can't, of course, not finally, not unless you're insane. I just thank God every day that we can still appreciate, you know, the simple things: flowers, streams, beautiful weather

  Robert was so obviously intelligent and reasonable that I longed to ask him what he thought about his father's mafia activities, but the subject never arose, and it seemed impossible to think of a way of phrasing the question without causing grave offence. But Robert did eventually touch on the murder of his brother Tony.

  'I cannot forgive those who were responsible,' he said. 'The other day I was at a dinner party. There were about one hundred people. Suddenly at the other end of the room I saw Solange Gemayel, Bashir's widow. I tried to avoid her, but she saw me across the party and came running across the room. She said: "It is reconciliation time." Why? She does not represent anything. I do not represent anything. Neither of us are politicians. Why reconcile? It would just hurt more. I don't want to be hurt again.'

  'What did you do?'

  'Out of respect for the guy who was giving the party I could not make a scandal. I had to shake her hand. But I hope I never see her again. Or any of her family. How can you ever forgive the family who shot your brother and his little daughter in cold blood?'

  Hotel Cavalier, Beirut, 17 October

  There was one last thing I hoped to do before I left Lebanon and headed south to the Holy Land. I wanted to talk to some of the Christian Palestinian refugees expelled from their ancestral homes at the creation of Israel in 1948. Lebanon's Christian Palestinians were the group which more than any other must have found itself caught in the crossfire during the civil war. As Christians, one might imagine that the Palestinians would have seen them as potential traitors; as Palestinians, the Lebanese Christians would have regarded them as 'terrorists' and vermin, fit only to be exterminated in the most brutal fashion possible. Corralled into their squalid and indefensible camps, the Palestinians suffered more than any other group in the civil war; and in such a situation the friendless Palestinian Christians must presumably have suffered worst of all. Special refugee camps had apparently been set up in Beirut to house this awkward group, and Nouri said he had some contacts who could get me into one of them.

  We drove back to the capital by a different route in order to visit the ancient city of Ba'albek, one of John Moschos's stopping points as he passed up the coast of Byzantine Phoenicia. From Bsharre we headed south-east over the high rocky ridges of Mount Lebanon, then corkscrewed down into soft green fields of the northern Bekaa. Despite the fertility of the soil and the estimated ten thousand tons of hashish it produces every year, quite apart from unspecified amounts of raw opium, the Bekaa looked much poorer than anywhere else in Lebanon. Peasants in rags were selling boxes of battered-looking apples by the roadside, and in the fields the untidy brown hessian tents of nomadic Bedouin flapped in the wind. The houses that dotted the roadside were little more than crude concrete boxes, with sacking for windows. Plastic bags and drifts of uncollected rubbish billowed across the valley, past the Syrian army radar station and out into the unseen opium fields beyond.

  The poverty of the Shiite farmers of the Bekaa made them especially fertile soil for the new fundamentalist ideas of the Iranian Revolution. When the Ayatollah's Revolutionary Guards took up station here - with tacit Syrian approval - at the end of the civil war, they quickly evicted the (overwhelmingly Christian) Lebanese army from their barracks in Ba'albek and raised the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran over the ruins of the Roman Temple of the Sun at the centre of the town. From that point on, Ba'albek became a centre of Iranian-backed anti-Christian militancy.

  The Iranians opened a two-storey propaganda office and strewed the Bekaa with posters denouncing the Israeli and American 'imperialists' and their Maronite 'lackeys', while exhorting all good Lebanese Muslims to find salvation through Islamic martyrdom. The Revolutionary Guards and their Shiite Lebanese allies together staged assaults on the Maronite villages in the northern Bekaa while their mullahs recorded viciously anti-Christian sermons to be broadcast on the Iranian-financed Ba'albek Television, the Shia equivalent of the fundamentalist American gospel channels. It was probably in Ba'albek that the suicide bombings which destroyed the American Embassy and military headquarters in Beirut were planned, and it was certainly to Ba'albek that many of the Western hostages were taken and held. Although t
he hostage crisis is now officially over, only a month ago a group of Danish diplomats were caught indiscreetly taking pictures of themselves in front of the Ba'albek Hezbollah headquarters. They were detained by the Hezbollah for a tense fortnight before a flurry of frantic diplomatic activity finally gained their release.

  Though no one in the Bekaa probably realised it, the Shia mullahs were in many ways repeating history when they chose Ba'albek as the centre of their operations. For in late antiquity Ba'albek was also a centre of anti-Christian activity, this time as a beacon of unreconstructed paganism. At the beginning of the fifth century, St John Chrysostom tried to stamp out the militant idol-worshippers of Lebanon by sending a task force of his monks to destroy the area's temples. According to Theodoret, 'Hearing that some of the inhabitants of Phoenicia were addicted to the worship of demons, John selected some ascetics who were filled with fervent zeal and sent them to destroy the idolatrous temples, inducing some ladies of great opulence to defray the monks' expenses; and [in due course] the temples of the demons were thrown down from their very foundations.'

  Not in Ba'albek, however. For 150 years later, in the 550s, the Emperor Justinian was forced to again order the destruction of Ba'albek's great Temple of the Sun, which was clearly functioning as busily as it had in the great days of pagan Rome. Justinian sent orders that all pagans must accept baptism, under penalty of confiscation and exile, and to make sure that the temple was not rebuilt, he ordered that many of its largest pillars be shipped to Constantinople, there to be re-erected at the centre of the Emperor's new basilica of Haghia Sophia.

  Even these extreme measures did not mean the end of paganism in Ba'albek. In 578 a.d., the year John Moschos set off on his travels, it was learned that the pagans of the town - still apparently the majority of the population - were again actively persecuting their Christian neighbours. The Emperor Tiberius Constantine duly ordered that five pagan priests were to be burned along with their idolatrous writings, and commanded that the remaining pagans of the town be brutally punished by the army. One source talks of there being no fewer than seven purges of pagans during the course of the sixth century, yet none of these measures seems to have had the slightest effect. Ba'albek was still active as a cult centre at the death of the Emperor Maurice in 602 a.d., and continued to flourish as a pagan centre well into the early Islamic period.

  Certainly when Moschos visited Ba'albek sometime in the early years of the seventh century, it still had a reputation as a redoubt of impiety. Moschos includes in The Spiritual Meadow a story about a blasphemous (and presumably pagan) actor from the city.

  This actor, Gaianas, used to perform in the theatre an act in which he blasphemed against the Holy Mother of God. The Mother of God appeared before him saying: "What evil have I done to you that you should revile me before so many people and blaspheme against me?'

  He rose up and, far from mending his ways, proceeded to blaspheme against her even more than before. Three times she appeared to him with the same reproach and admonition. As he did not mend his ways in the slightest degree, but rather blasphemed the more, she appeared to him once when he was sleeping at midday and said nothing at all. All she did was to sever his two hands and feet with her finger. When he awoke he found that his hands and feet were so afflicted that he just lay there like a treetrunk.

  Gaianas apparently spent the rest of his days being carried on a stretcher from town to town across the length of Byzantine Phoenicia warning others not to fall into the same errors as himself. John Moschos points out with some relish, however, that despite his contrition, the Virgin did not see fit to restore his faculties to him.

  As we neared Ba'albek, signs of Iranian influence visibly increased. On the roadsides we began to pass the same hoardings of turbaned Iranian mullahs I had seen in Beirut's southern suburbs. Other tableaux, painted in the gaudy primary colours of Egyptian film posters, showed Kalashnikov-wielding Shi'ite fighters blazing away at Israeli troops in southern Lebanon; some of these posters were topped with small pennants decorated with the insignia of the Hezbollah, the pro-Iranian Party of God. The men trudging along the road began to display bushy, moustacheless Islamic beards while their womenfolk became more and more heavily shrouded in layers of thick black chador. At every crossroads we were approached by small boys in white cotton robes shaking collecting tins and soliciting donations for the Hezbollah's war against the Israeli occupying forces in the south of the country.

  On the outskirts of the town we passed the Galerie Balkajian, a ritzy new Armenian (Christian) furniture shop. It enthusiastically trumpeted its unlikely loyalty to Shia Islam by filling the entire exterior of its warehouse with the iconography of the Islamic Revolution, centred on a huge mural of the Ayatollah Khomeini glaring down over the Dome of the Rock. Beyond the warehouse, the magnificent ruins of some of the most spectacular Roman buildings ever constructed rose above the dusty rundown houses of the modern town. Nervous of Ba'albek's reputation for violence, Nouri opted to stay in the street guarding his precious Mercedes while I went off alone to look at the ruins of the Temple of the Sun.

  Like the decor of modern Maronite drawing rooms, the emphasis in the temple's decoration seemed to be on opulence rather than good taste: as you wandered around, you kept thinking: 'How much did this cost?' The temple was a monument to decorative excess: whole gardens of acanthus tendrils and palmettes voluted over the stonework; imperial lion-masks - unembarrassed lumps of high classical kitsch - roared out over the great baroque orgy of the ruins. The columns, each eight feet thick, were taller than any elsewhere in the classical world; each capital was larger than a fully-grown man, and covered with enough different leaf forms to fill a greenhouse at Kew. It was an exuberant, theatrical monument, designed more for ostentation than religiosity, and it undoubtedly achieved its aim. Flanked on either side by snow peaks, sheltered by a windbreak of cypress, it was a wonderfully flash piece of Roman showmanship, and showed that an unrestrained love of glitz is nothing new in this part of the world.

  I knew from my reading that the Byzantines had built a fine basilica in the middle of the temple as part of one their periodic attempts to suppress the town's militant population of pagans. Yet despite the temple's generally excellent state of preservation, I looked in vain for any sign of Byzantine work. I have since learned from archaeologists in Beirut that the reason for this was not so much a pagan wrecking campaign as a piece of French colonial dirigisme. Apparently when French archaeologists dug the ruins in the 1930s they removed the Byzantine basilica, assuming, with typically Gallic certainty, that posterity would find their reconstruction of a pagan classical altar more interesting than the Byzantine basilica that succeeded it.

  I sat in the small Temple of Jupiter, watching a handful of Lebanese tourists circle the ruins. There was a couple with a pushchair, a few modest Shia women in dark headscarves and a carload of noisy Maronite babes in tight hip-hugging jeans, thick lashings of mascara and great bouffant beehives of back-combed hair. Despite the recent kidnapping of the Danish diplomats and Nouri's nervousness, the visitors seemed relaxed and happy as they clambered around the pillars taking photographs of each other, giggling and smiling, determined to make the most of their day out from Beirut.

  Then, quite suddenly, a burst of automatic fire echoed over the ruins. A few seconds later there were two more loud bursts of rapid fire followed by a massive explosion on the hillside above the town. As I watched a great brown mushroom cloud of dust and smoke exploded into the air from a ridge half a mile from the temple. I immediately took shelter behind a capital, but to my embarrassment none of the Lebanese jumped or even looked twice at the menacing plume of the explosion. One businessman filming his family with a camcorder swung briefly around to record the cloud of smoke, then swept back to pan over the pediments of the temple and his smiling wife and baby. He saw me picking myself up, dusting the dirt from my jeans, and smiled. 'It is only the Hezbollah,' he said. 'Probably they are just training. Almost certainly they are just tr
aining.'

  Nouri was waiting, as arranged, in the lobby of the Cavalier at nine this morning. With him was his friend Abed, another taxi driver who said he had good contacts in the Palestinian camps. Abed said he could take me to some Christian Palestinians and suggested we try the Mar Elias refugee camp, not far from the notorious massacre site of Chatila.

  The camp was a very different place to the squalid shanty towns I knew from the West Bank. Rather than rotting behind some high-tension razor-wire fence, it lay instead behind a line of smart boutiques - Valentino, Lagerfeld and Benetton - their exquisitely dressed dummies frozen in strange sartorial contortions behind the spotlit plate glass of the shop fronts. No clear boundaries separated the camp from the surrounding houses. Only the extreme, visible poverty of its residents and the density of shrapnel holes pockmarking the facades of the buildings marked it out from its unexpectedly prosperous surroundings.

  Abed parked his battered old Mercedes just outside the camp and led me confidently through the narrow warren of breezeblock houses. Mar Elias, he explained, had been one of the luckiest camps in the war. Sure, it had been intermittently shelled by the Israelis, who had used phosphorus and even cluster bombs on the refugees' shacks, but unlike some neighbouring camps it had never been completely flattened by Israeli carpet bombing or Phalange bulldozers, nor had it ever suffered a major massacre like nearby Chatila, Sabra or Karantina. Its residents were very poor, of course, and suffered the same disabilities that hamstring all Palestinians in Lebanon - banned from all but menial jobs, forbidden from buying property or travelling freely, refused access to state schools - but, relatively speaking, they had been lucky. Moreover they were not in any immediate danger of eviction. Lebanese politicians were currently threatening to tear down the Palestinians' camps elsewhere in Beirut and dump the refugees out of sight somewhere on the front line in southern Lebanon. But Mar Elias was built on Greek Orthodox Church land, and if there was no obvious hope of the Palestinians ever being allowed to go back to their homes and farms in what was now northern Israel, then at least they were not in any immediate danger of being expelled from their makeshift camp in Beirut.