Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  ***

  Five dollars - but not in gold - is still what it costs to travel from Beirut to Baalbek, but nowadays all it buys you is a seat of fear in the back of a minibus. No horses, no servants, no pack-mules, no circus tents, no fine white linen, no dragoman; you are in a one minibus caravanserai, and it’s always in a hurry and it’s always playing with the dice of oncoming death. I have survived two rides in a Lebanese minibus before and know that for the next two hours life is going to lie on a thin thread.

  At Beirut bus station we head for the Baalbek line. Amidst the choked air and carefree decibels three minibuses are being hawked full. I have noticed how Lebanese minibuses wear their battle scars without shame - indeed with pride. I try to choose the least scratched and dented of the three waiting to leave. The drivers are all in their mid-thirties, prematurely graying, two are smoking - as they will be throughout - when not simultaneously talking in to their cellphones all the way to Baalbek. I choose the least battered minibus, a Korean-made SsangYong Istana in a mild shade of purple with scratched silver hubcaps and sporting four aerials idiot dancing on the roof shouting from the rooftops. So far it’s also the only one not blaring out trebled-up Lebanese pop music. One of the smoking drivers is standing at the driver’s door.

  “Are you the driver?” I ask.

  “Driver, yes,” he replies. “You go Baalbek?”

  “Yes, Baalbek. You drive slow or fast?”

  He pauses, angling for the reply I have in mind. “Slow. Drive slow.” “Safe? Not maniac.”

  “Yes, safe, safe. Everyday safe. Slow.”

  By now four or five others have joined our conversation. One of them speaks French. He translates into Arabic my wish to be alive at lunchtime, and not to be frightened witless in the meantime. The driver laughs and claps, flicks his cigarette out into the yard and ushers us round to the passenger seats alongside him. I thank him but take the middle seats in the middle rows, surrounding Gillian and myself - for my ears only - with eight Arab airbags. I think I’m turning into Mark Twain and must pull myself together.

  ***

  Back in 1867, after their first memorable breakfast, the caravanserai broke camp at Temnin-al-Faouqa and re-joined the Beirut to Aleppo track, an old feeder route into the Silk Road souk town of Aleppo. Mark Twain noted with some surprise that “all the Syrian world seemed to be under way also. The road was filled with mule trains and long processions of camels.” Oh boy! If only he could see it now...

  ***

  The writer has driven, and been driven, all over the world, but there is nowhere more frightening than Lebanon. One accepts that in India, to use a familiar example, driving is haphazard by nature, somewhat anarchic, and seemingly fatalistic, but consolation comes because the chaos and drama are all played out in slow motion. Accidents happen, but slowly: few cars are capable of even cantering and even if in theory one or two may be capable of a gallop the steeplechase roads soon put a stop to speedy ambition. Not so in Lebanon, where a combination of out-sized, over-powered cars - typically the most throbbingly penile SUVs that America makes (a Hummer is about right) or the most bellicose sports saloons that Germany makes (AMG tagged Mercs or M tagged BMWs pass muster, Audis are a bit feeble) - driven by vengeful people with pumped-up identities on smooth yet unmarked eight-lane highways combine to create a kind of mad Dantean circus of powerful egos in powerful cars clashing with clashing egos in clashing cars.

  The only hope, and thank heavens for it, is the gridlocked traffic. In Beirut the gridlock is permanent by day, and if your luck holds for much of the night. On the open road, the road to Baalbek for example, traffic blocks come in fits and starts, either at road-works or an accident; one hopes for lots of the former and none of the latter on a “be careful what you wish for” basis. Passengering in the traffic jams is still stressful, as instead of just creeping gently along the drivers will accelerate flat out for ten yards then stomp on the brakes to stop in half a yard, all followed by the obligatory blast on the horn. One feels like a shake puppet in a Punch & Judy routine as one involun- tarily follows the body language of the cars.

  There is only one experience in Lebanon worse than being a passenger and that is being a pedestrian. There are no pavements, no traffic lights let alone pedestrian lights, no foot soldier quarter is given, no infantry slack is cut. Courtesy is concept that fails to translate, like there being no real German word for humor - or English word for Schadenfreude. If you are on foot you become a sub-species, an easy target for the pit-bull terrier four-wheel drives itching for a fight. Yet it is not cars but horns which provide the worst foot- borne experience of all: no taxi driver can pass a pedestrian, even one going nowhere or the other way, without blowing his horn to catch their attention. If you ignore it they just blow again; if you still ignore it they just lean on the horn until you wave them “no”. Beirut is easily the most tiresome place in the world.

  The SsangYong Istana minibus, fully laden, swerves erratically as it climbs up to Temnin-al-Faouqa and then over the brow of the summit above Beirut. Somehow we have avoided hitting anything, and nothing seems to have hit us. Over the summit the view changes completely: there lies the famed Bekaa Valley. From above it looks distant and dusty, yet lightly populated and farmed. The minibus plunges down the other side, hurtling along on the edge of control on a much better road financed by “The Government & Citizens of Saudi Arabia: Towards Our Islamic Reconstruction”. Thanks for nothing, government and citizens of Saudi Arabia. As we level out the floor of the valley disappoints. Either side of the road is covered in old plastic: bottles in all shapes and sizes, bags in all colors and logos, crumbling polystyrene packaging and dirty yellowed sheeting. The farms are fallow, the petrol stations closed, the villages lifeless. The only signs of life are signs of learning, as for some reason this area of desolation has become home to any number of private universities signposted off the main road: the Lebanese Canadian University, the Arab University of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley Campus - the latter flying clean new Swedish and European Union flags. It is such an incongruous area to which to entice private students that one’s thoughts immediately turn to what kind of front they all are: espionage, money-laundering, people trafficking, identity swapping, opium refining - we are just south of the poppy and marijuana growing areas - or perhaps Dr. No dens?

  After five miles an ayatollah poster hangs from a lamppost, then another, then crossed yellow and green Koran and Kalashnikov flags, and then we are in Chtaura and the start of Hezbollah country.

  Farming in most of the Bekaa has always been marginal and as first the Christians and then the Sunnis moved to an easier life on the coast and the towns, Shia farmers from the east moved in. After the 1980s civil war the area was under Syrian control and poorer than ever. Hezbollah, the Party of God, was already active in South Lebanon as a reaction to the Israeli- proxy Phalange militia, the SLA - the South Lebanon Army. With the cease- fire holding and their fellow Shias in the north in destitution Hezbollah and their sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, approached the Syrians for permission to establish a formal local headquarters at Baalbek. The Syrians, seeing this as an opportunity to unburden themselves of responsibility for the Bekaa farmers and associate themselves with an organization sworn to “Destroy the Zionist Entity”, readily agreed; now, of course, they regret having what has become a de facto Iranian province across an open and porous border. We have already come across one of Mark Twain’s tenets, Providence, now it’s time to cue the other: the Law of Unintended Consequences. We are going to come across it so often it deserves an acronym to save my typing fingers: TLUC, tee-luck.

  From Chtaura the road and the countryside improve, in fact it is trans- formed. The Party of God is only too pleased to tell you, albeit still in French, that there is so much more to it than “Annihilating Israel from Palestine and the Face of the Earth”. The Iranian money has built the best road in Lebanon from Zahle to Baalbek
, has installed irrigation ditches and health clinics, organized farmers’ markets, set up a transport co-operative, opened its own TV and radio station and built dozens of new mosques. Quite the little Sweden, Kalashnikovs notwithstanding.

  ***

  By this stage of his Holy Land tour Mark Twain had seen enough of the local politics to find them indigestible. “If ever an oppressed race existed,” he wrote at camp that night, “it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little - not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.” I presume one of the dragomen had just explained the wonderful world of Ottoman taxation. The ruler of a province would estimate the amount of taxes he thought his region should bring. He would then auction off parcels of land, cash up front, to individual tax collectors. These parcels would still be too big for the top rung of collectors, so they in turn would auction off the collecting rights to a lower level, and so on, sometimes down to village level. In this sort of franchised reverse pyramid collecting system the peasant farmer was routinely routed. When it came to the tax collection “the peasant [has] to bring his little trifle of grain to the village, at his own cost. It must be weighed, the various taxes set apart, and the remainder returned to the producer. But the collector delays this duty day after day, while the producer’s family are perishing for bread; at last the poor wretch, who cannot but understand the game, says, ‘Take a quarter - take half - take two-thirds if you will, and let me go!’ It is a most outrageous state of things.”

  ***

  But back to now – and these good new roads mean even more daunting passengering and I’m pleased to jump out of the minibus at Karaq, thirty miles before Baalbek. It’s here we are going to change from public to private transport; waiting for us should be Francis, nephew of - and recommended by - the manager of the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek, of whom and of which more later. He is to be our guide around Baalbek and then he will drive us to Damascus. Francis speaks better French8 than English and Gillian speaks better French than me (by a factor of une mille it has to be said) and so it is she who three days ago spent long enough haggling with him on the phone to feel we have been swindled more or less equally. At the end of the phone call we had a little Lebanese moment. Francis said “Je suis catholique, est-ce un problème?”; of course Gillian said “Pas du tout.”

  ***

  Armed with our new Ferguson, Francis, we re-join the Excursionists on their first visit to a Holy Land site: Noah’s Tomb9 - the “Noah of Deluge notoriety” as Mark Twain puts it, the tomb of “the honored old navigator”. Of course it is no such thing and never has been.

  Unfortunately today the word “myth” has come to mean something that is untrue. The “Mythbusters”, claiming to unearth misconceptions, is a popular TV series; the phrase “urban myth” has come to mean a story that is widely held to be true but is actually untrue; myths are ripe for “debunking”. A myth, as it was understood from the beginnings of knowledge until the Age of Reason, meant a story that helped explain the inexplicable. When we hear that the sea parted to help a fleeing race, the myth behind it was not concerned with what actually happened, let alone when or how, but what an event meant. A myth by its very nature could not be, did not claim to be, “true”, as a fact is true; a myth only started where fact/truths could not be explained. In fact, as Jung discovered in his search for the soul, myths have always used deliberately fictitious motifs and like all good fiction have asked those “what-if?” questions that take us beyond what we like to think of as “ourselves” and gives us a glimpse of the Self in all.

  The flood myth is one of civilization’s original myths, and always has as its motif divine retribution for mankind’s waywardness. The earliest dating is in the Sumerian book of Genesis in the eighteenth century BC. It became a central myth of the Babylonians. The polytheistic Egyptians, Hindus and Greeks all evolved versions of the deluge myth as did the Levantine tribes of Asia Minor. From those shores, somewhere around 1000 BC, it found its way into the Old Testament10 Genesis, but modernized to have occurred in only around 4000 BC. Islam too has adopted the myth, with the Genesis dating, and there is even an Irish flood myth featuring Noah’s granddaughter as an early Irish settler.

  Like all myths it has a basis in reality, something that happened once and could happen again. In this case it was the great flood caused by the combining of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, a truly terrifying, catastrophic event in which a great wall of water swept over cultivated plains destroying every- thing and everyone in its path. And like all great myths it explained the inexplicable in concepts easy to understand. Interestingly enough, literal readers of the Bible are still searching Mount Ararat for remnants of the ark, and a long search they will have too; such is the ironic power of myth; such is the ironic mind so much more evolved than the literal mind.

  It’s quite likely that most, if not all, of the New Pilgrims in Mark Twain’s group favored the literal version and believed that the “honored old navigator” really was buried there, but Mark Twain could barely keep the smile off his face. He noted that “the proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The evidence is pretty straight. Shem, the son of Noah, was present at the burial, and showed the place to his descendants, who transmitted the knowledge to their descendants, and the lineal descendants of these introduced themselves to us to-day. It was pleasant to make the acquaintance of members of so respectable a family. It was a thing to be proud of. It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself. Noah’s memorable voyage will always possess a living interest for me, henceforward.”

  ***

  Nowadays old Noah’s Tomb has become a Hezbollah madrassah, empty of students when we visit but with all doors and windows open in the heat of mid-afternoon. I learn later that the conversion from tomb to madrassah is a new enterprise, only completed last winter. The long low building in which the tomb was said to have rested has been converted into a classroom with three dozen low lying desks at which the children kneel and learn the Koran by rote - not unlike the way the Jewish Orthodox children have to learn the Torah. All wisdom is contained within the Koran or the first five chapters of the Old Testament, depending on where you are, and no other education is needed. Behind the desks, along the back wall, giant posters with gilded Koranic quotes rest on trestle tables, themselves holding racks of Koranic tracts; from the ceilings new green-shaded bar-room-style lights on long leads hang down over the tiny desks; the barefoot floor is spotless and disinfected.

  Alongside the madrassah a small mosque has been added, again in the last few months, its walls decorated not with Koranic posters but pin-ups of various ayatollahs. Over the windows the Hezbollah flags flutter in the breeze, the yellow and green motifs of Korans and Kalashnikovs shading the room. A heavier Hezbollah kilim or rug hangs loosely from the connecting lentil.

  Outside is deserted too. The new Muslim cemetery has been replanted with oleander and fig trees, its paths weeded, its wrought iron railings repainted black. In the grounds lie its first three martyrs. Each grave has a photograph in a glass case above the tombstone. The Hezbollah flag flies over the glass case. Francis leads us over and translates. Engraved signs at the foot of the grave in Arabic tell each martyr’s story: all three young men were born in Karaq but died elsewhere. One presumes recent interment. Two of them are in army fatigues, the third in a shiny suit; the first two were killed in action in 2006. The third, Abdul Al-Fahadi, 1990-2007, was a suicide bomber. One looks closely at his photograph again, but the eyes were dead even when he was alive. Gillian and I look back at the madrassah in despair; Francis looks back in dread.

  ***

  It is hard to see why Baalbek was included in the Mark Twain’s Holy Land tour; it is surely magnificent, quite magnificent, but its magnificence
stems from it being the Roman Empire’s most sacred site of pagan worship, and the largest temple complex in the whole Roman Empire. The Temples to Jupiter and Bacchus are still standing, just about, and the one to Venus still has its substructure in place. The Temple to Mercury, built on an adjacent hill, has all but disappeared. Later local gods were incorporated into the worship there.

  Mark Twain noted that Baalbek was “a noble ruin whose history is a sealed book. It has stood there for thousands of years, the wonder and admiration of travelers; but who built it, or when it was built, are questions that may never be answered.” In 1867 this was so, but thirty years later Kaiser Wilhelm II visited the site and, like everyone before and since, was overwhelmed by the scale of the endeavor. He bought permission from the Ottoman Sultanate to excavate the site, a task since taken over by teams from France as a part of the spoils of the First World War.

  Although the site has been used for worship since 9000 BC it was not until Alexander the Great passed through in the mid-330s BC that work started on building along the classical Greco-Roman lines we see today. The period of greatest change came two hundred years later when Pompey ordered the building of the temples there today. Julius Caesar visited Baalbek in 50 BC and established it as a formal Roman colony. The temples took 120 years to build, and were only finished when Nero was emperor, in around 60 AD.

  What was thought in Mark Twain’s time to be the Temple of the Sun is now known as the Grand Court, and what he called the Temple of Jupiter is now known to be the Temple of Bacchus. Nevertheless the scale remains the same: “These temples are built upon massive substructions that might support a world, almost; the materials used are blocks of stone as large as an omnibus and these substructions are traversed by tunnels of masonry through which a train of cars might pass. With such foundations as these, it is little wonder that Baalbec has lasted so long. The Temple of the Sun (actually Jupiter) is nearly three hundred feet long and one hundred and sixty feet wide. It had fifty- four columns around it, but only six are standing now - and six more shapely columns do not exist. The columns and the entablature together are ninety feet high - a prodigious altitude for shafts of stone to reach, truly - and yet one only thinks of their beauty and symmetry when looking at them; the pillars look slender and delicate, the entablature, with its elaborate sculpture, looks like rich stucco-work.”