Our second ex-Beirut expedition, postponed from last weekend, was a lengthy one, but much, much nicer than our first. We were picked up by our guide at 7.30 in the morning and drive down to Sidon for a breakfast of fuul and hummus in a little old shop that felt like it could be in Lahore’s inner city aside from the monumental Arab grandmother in the corner and the complete lack of spice. It was a tasty and sustaining breakfast, fortunately as we didn’t have another bite to eat till about six. The Gentleman Friend and I then explored a bit of Sidon. We were supposed to go to the soap museum but instead wandered into the courtyard of a Greek church where a very little man stepped out of a Cronenberg film and spoke to us enthusiastically in a mixture of Arabic and French. We gathered that he was offering to show us the church so we followed him to see some murals of Genesis, very attractive, and then a fine sixth century mosaic floor in the church. There are a lot of mosaics in Lebanon. We then wandered through the souq’s rough hewn corridors and alleyways, into a small rock cut church, feeling we were properly in the Holy Land. On emerging from the souq we walked back towards the Sea Castle where the car was parked, popping in at a Khan with its stone hewn arches set around a courtyard. The sea castle itself was smaller than one likes a castle to be (this is true of virtually every castle in the world), but very picturesque, and with layer upon layer of occupation. A French-built causeway led to it, and on top of the ruin was a small Ottoman mosque on top of a Crusader church on top of a Roman temple, with repurposed granite columns brought over from Aswan. The sea was high, nearly at the level of the courtyard, and it was a clear, vivid morning.
We drove up next to Maghdouche, a hill overlooking Sidon where there is a cave in which Mary waited for Christ when he went to preach in the city. The cave itself had a simple altar and baptismal font with an icon of the Virgin and Child, but around it was development that reminded me a bit of Penang’s Buddha of Air Hitam: a great statue dominating the hill, overlooking the city, with empty white terraces and meant for occasional celebrations but usually relatively empty. There were probably about the hundred people there, Maronite Christian families and some clusters of Ethipioan women with light headscarves and bare feet. From the top of the tower, at the feet of the statue, you could see all around; the glittering sea of course, Sidon, and dark smudge at the foot of the hill: the Palestinian camp of Ain al Hilweh, a walled and razor wired settlement that our guide said was perhaps the most dangerous place in Lebanon. Which is probably saying quite a lot.
From Maghdouche we went south, stopping at a small mosque which was the site of the grave of the Nabi Sari, a prophet whom I have been unable to identify at least from a quick googling. This is a Shia managed shrine, but luckily I had brought a long sleeved top and a scarf so was respectable to enter. Inside, on the women’s side, was a dark, cool room lined with bookshelves and a few carpets on the floor. The tomb was behind a grille, of course, a dark, green space with the metallic embroidery of the tomb covering glittering in the dark. The grill was thickly covered with knotted rosaries and scraps of fine cloth, a custom one finds across the Asian continent. I peered through; there were none on the men’s side of the tomb. Folk religion is a women’s game, I suppose.
The next stop was Tyre, the Phoenician city, home of Dido, supplier of purple. Once it had been an island, until Alexander built a land bridge to capture it. We went first to the hippodrome, on the mainland, where huge arches still survived, and parts of the hippodrome’s galleries and stands. Inevitably, it evoked Ben Hur so I hope the chariot race depicted Roman races with at least some accuracy. It was very hot and bright and dusty, and the hippodrome was large and open enough for dust devils to form.
The next stop was the other half of the Roman city, on what had once been an island. Here, arcades of columns led down to the sea, where poeple were swimming and wading in what looked like quite high waves. All Muslims here. The old part of Tyre is a Christian area, and there all the people seemed to be Muslims, or at least not wearing headscarfs in this Shia dominated area, but bikinis and drinking cocktails. We walked through the streets with their colourfully painted houses, still actual homes rather than restaurants and tourist traps. There were some fine characters sitting around the port, grizzled men as one finds in every port, with rolling gaits and faces sculpted by sun and wind. The best of these was a sea captain sitting by himself on a chair, regal rather than isolated, with a mighty beard and a hosepipe running water over his trousers.
After Tyre, Qana, the site of the wedding. Or at least one of the possible sites, I shall take it to be the one as it was highly atmospheric. It is on a hillside, with a path leading down to a cave overlooking an immense, bare valley; again, properly Holy Land, with what looked like military fortifications scattered about. The cave was small, dark and with a cross wrapped in white at the end. Not a very wedding-y spot to my mind, but perhaps it looked different then. Above the cave were some rock carvings that were too weathered for me to make out what they are, but I am told they depict the wedding and are the proof of this as the actual Qana. All along the path were olive trees tied with scraps of white.
This whole area is Hezbollah territory, and as we drove out we saw the yellow flags fluttering and portraits of martyred young men along the road. We stopped along the way for figs (three kilos the minimum purchase) and one of the area’s famous watermelons (10 kg the smallest). We will have nothing but figs and watermelon in the days to come. Then up, up into the hills, to Mleeta, the Hezbollah-run open air museum.
This was fascinating and, I must say, very slick aside from a couple of missteps. Mleeta is one of the sites from where Hezbollah forces fought the Israelis, some kilometres further south. We began with a film about the site and a potted history of the conflict, quite well made aside from its insistence on using every possible form of music that was appropriate to a film of this type: Arabic folk songs, solemn dirges, martial music, Braveheart bagpipes for a death scene, etc. Then we joined a small group – three Germans, a Norwegian and a western-educated young Arab woman – to be led around by one of the guides. The first stop was the Abyss, a great pit of twisted armaments and vehicles, very handsomely arranged though with a couple of missteps etc a tank’s gun snout tied into a cartoonish knot. There was a bridge running over this pit as well as a path to walk through the thicket and touch some of the displays, and one rather sweet child found himself a rusting jeep embedded in concrete, got into the driver’s seat and alternated making vrooming sounds with sucking on a large red ice lolly.
We then peeled off to explore the rest by ourselves, including some fine tunnels, woodland displays of weaponry, and a platform overlooking the valley with massive Lebanese and Hezbollah flags. Finally, there was a large circular room which a very good display of captured armaments set in the floor, in niches on the wall, and in a central sculpture. One really can’t fault the museological skills. On the way out I popped into a gift shop and was tempted by one of the pebbles painted with the yellow flag but then thought it was hardly the sort of thing one wants to travel the world with, regardless of poltical views.
On the way back we stopped in Sidon for a much delayed lunch, some fantastic grilled lamb with chunks of fat, and then finally back to Beirut, there to have a cup of tea, some figs, and collapse.