Nahr al-Kalb

And then James texted. Would you like to take a break, take a walk on the beach? The air con growled, the computer screen hummed and hazed. I blinked, and smelled salt in my mind. There would be no Conflict Studies today.

The day’s heat had dulled a fraction, exhausted by its own intractable humidity. The doorbell rang, and bare feet slipped across the polished floors. And then there were three – Alex (irrepressible), James (a gentleman and a scholar), and a tall, uncertain girl in a blue-flowered skirt, who should know better than to complain.

Because despite uncertainties, and office days and theses and the hopeless business of being oneself, there are ever fascinations at the bottom of the autostrade. Come and see.


Three uncertain souls, tripping through the dust. They cleave paths through the traffic and in the thick air, leaving swirls of horseplay in their wake. A hop, a skip, a road, a thousand toots on a hundred horns, another road, a bridge over a river, and there the cars disappear into a hole in the hill. It doesn’t look like much, this river. The water is sluggish and unkempt, the extravagant plant life on its banks reaching skywards and overshadowing it with prehistoric fronds and spears. But this is Nahr al-Kalb, the Dog River, once Lycus. The bridge across it takes you to the base of the valley into which it cuts. Look left, into the mountains. The stone arch you can see was built by the Mamluks, just one of innumerable different peoples that have passed this way. For this is the path to the coast of Lebanon from Syria, and from far beyond. Down this narrow valley, bristling with ambushes, army after army across centuries and dynasties has trudged in nervous single file, in pursuit of whatever it is that armies like to pursue. Look right. Make an enormous leap of the imagination and wipe the autostrade from existence (O happy dream!), and this is the sea they saw as they emerged into the light and the sky, buckling perhaps in the heat beneath their helmets and uniforms and weapons, their numbers diminished, their victories or defeats ever destined to be impermanent.

Such was their relief at the sight of the Mediterranean, Beyrouth mere miles down the coast, that they carved their marks into the rocky wall of the valley. We survived, they say. We came with spears or guns or crowns, with threats or offerings or salvation. We leave this moment here in stone, in thanks or as a warning.

And, people, this shit is crazy. There the French liberated the Levant with regiments from their colonies. There Caracalla, Marcus Aurelius Antonius, left word of his doings. There an Assyrian figure is just visible, a stony silhouette in the rock, there an Egyptian one was obliterated by a marble plaque bearing the name of Napoleon. Greeks and Brits, Nebuchadnezzar and Ramses II, every few paces the French. The freshest, cleanest plaques are of the Lebanese Forces; it has been much less than twenty years since the last militia stamped its claim. An unofficial hand has carved a clumsy cedar in a circle, for this is Phalangist territory. The wars are barely done.

Extraordinary, then, and extraordinarily sad. What to say about the tracks men leave along their warring ways? They are everywhere, whether plaques or graves or languages or boundaries on a map. Here, the glut of memorials is comically overwhelming. Look on these works, and may your mourning never end, that the killing never starts again.

Climb higher, cursing the swimming costume under your clothes, and you can look back on Zouk Mosbeh in all its grimy glory. A plinth stands empty here, where once the statue of a dog reared up, and was said to send his bark out over land and sea to warn of enemies, with such a booming power that it could be heard in Cyprus. The sun is doing its best to set dramatically; the air is heavy with the day and with possibility. We had not planned this.


And so three souls, hot and dusty now, hop and skip with a little less élan towards the shore of the sea. A kingfisher darts quick and blue under the bridge and guides the way. There is litter-strewn sand, there are fishermen, there are cats fighting noisily in the dunes. There is a ghetto blaster playing Arabic chants under striped umbrellas. The sea is as warm as blood, and its surface does not bear scrutinising. They dip in anyway; feel the stones and then the sand and the pull and the swash. They stretch out in the water for a moment, and everything looks different, even the smokestacks and the tankers anchored in the bays. At some evening hour without a name, the ripples become glossy with a particular light and everything blushes darker, washed through with pink, shyly beautiful through the mess and the strange smells and the sound of traffic.


Some things don’t get better. But others are always good. Seek them out and cherish them, for tomorrow there will be Harry Potter at City Mall, and on the same day in a year’s time there may be La Traviata sung under the sky at a Roman temple in Baalbek, melodies floating away on the same air that once danced with the breath of Fairouz, of Umm Khalthum, of Ella Fitzgerald. The blue-flowered skirt will have been worn to a rag, the uncertainty will never go away. But some things are always good.


And Michael, the very best of brothers. Happy Birthday – have the very best of years.