Jbeil (Byblos)

The day smelled of sun cream, and of adventure. The candy-striped smokestacks belched black smoke in celebration as I flip-flopped to the autostrade past the Societé Italien-Libanais pour les Savons et Détérgents, getting stuck to the juice running from the charcuterie bins that was cooking gently on the tarmac, trickled over with delighted ants.

A minibus is always on hand to take you away from these Zouk delights. They rattle and pounce through the traffic, hand permanently on horn, hounding down potential passengers and nearly running them over. When one screeches to a stop, curious eyes ask the question, “What is a silly white girl doing getting the bus out here?” What indeed, but even if I spoke Arabic I might not be able to explain. And so it’s wedge yourself up against a militiaman, speed and sway and elbow out of the window as the wind rushes through and blows your hair into crazy shapes. And it’s hot, God it’s hot. It’s banana groves and the driver with one wrist barely on the wheel as he counts money and smokes and drives, and men asleep at the roadside under umbrellas next to their stacks of fish or wooden carts of melons and figs. It’s gorges and mountains and icons of the Virgin Mary swinging and mile after mile of tower blocks stacked up the hillside like a blind man’s dominoes, the line of the coast and bewildering Arabic arguments, Miss Lebanon Emigrant, Super Night Clubs with their Russian girls, guns on hips and Fayrouz and the open road and Roadster Diner, there goes my heart.

So take your time in Jbeil, when you stagger off the bus and across the roads into the town. Take your time, and the town will take it with you, for inventing cursive script to make your trade go more quickly and flooding the world with the alphabet is not the work of an afternoon. Wander through the souq, past the jelly sandals and the achingly kitsch portraits of saints and soldiers and Hariri, past fat men asleep in chairs and children running errands. Past the grandfather bent over bits of an engine whose face could have looked on the Arab conquest in AD 636, it is so old and strangely coloured, and his eyes so red and tired. Take your time, and sit in the shade in the harbour and watch the world, which doesn’t really go by so much as snooze its way sluggishly along.

Watch the boats strung with flags slumbering on the water, and the fishes swimming in it. Watch the sun blistering the paint and red-and-white wooden rudders and empty seats by tangled nets and wicker fishing baskets. Watch the tourists come and go to Pepe’s famous fish restaurant, rucksacks and water and cameras, and ponder the strangeness of this little harbour, pleasant and quiet as it is. Look up at the tumbledown tower – a Crusading tower that watches over the remains of the works its masters conquered – and down, into the turquoise water, and see the ancient quays sleeping there. From the restaurants opposite you can look across the water and wonder who sat there over time, and if they pondered who would sail through the opening of the harbour that day – Egyptians, Amorites, Turks, Greeks, Phoenicians? What would they bring, this time? New languages, new religions, new buildings? New evictions, new burnings of statues, new empires. The ebb and flow of trade was the motor of all these things, which took the place from scratchy, shabby fishing village to worldwide trading port and back again.

Wander around the corner, and the ancient city walls are just as ancient city walls should be, stony and imposing and brushed with the fronds of palms heavy with netted-up dates. But the sea – the sea is blue green blue and a perfect semicircle of beach, pink striped pebbles like gobstoppers, and I will come here to swim and walk whenever I can. For this is just half an hour up the coast from Zouk, and your regular constitutional can take in ten different conquests and the birth of a written language, swimming over the debris of nations. Inside the walls, the streets of houses with their sunny stone and cobbles made of pebbles laid in patterns are just as streets and houses should be. The churches and gardens are even more so, hung as they are with lemons, with jasmine, with glorious swathes of pinkest bougainvillea and with heavy pomegranates. Somewhere, a chorus of tiny voices is singing the numbers in French. The air smells, finally, of flowers and warm stone and olive trees and peace. Somewhere, a fish is grilling.

Circle round and about a little, and on a promontory above the harbour lies another impossible, bizarre palimpsest of peoples and the extravaganza of remains they leave behind them. Because this is Lebanon, you wander unguided and unrestrained across the years, picking paths worn in and around every possible corner, coke cans in Phoenician graves and enormous lizards scuttling where earthquakes revealed underground tunnels. Sarcophagi and obelisks, flowers and palms and a few brave upright columns on a hillside still lining the dream of a worshipful avenue, where yews now grow. Carvings of bulls, foundations of houses from eight different centuries, Isis weeping in a hollow, a toy amphitheatre with Bacchus tiled into the floor and round and round and on and on for acres until you wind up exhausted at the Frankish fort, climb up and look down upon it all, wondering.

Eight thousand years of history, ‘discovered’ by Ernest Renan in 1860. Ah, Monsieur Renan. We met in the quietness of the stacks of a library in grey London. Here you are again on the shores of the Mediterranean, wielding your Orientalist pen. Very well. Let us walk, and talk a little, hot and tired as I am, and you so short and fat and in ghostly mourning for your sister Henriette, who died of a fever at your home in Amchit up the coast. Let us lean on the warm stone of a Roman pillar, still crowned with its ornate architrave, and ponder how this can be.

Ernest wrote epic books on grand themes, and spent some time thinking about memory, which is not surprising considering he spent so much time digging it up. In the Jbeil ruins, a little metal railway meanders through and around Chalcolithic walls and Egyptian tombs and Amorite temples. It is dusty and rusted now, overgrown with vines and scrubby grasses, its metal cart tipped over years ago and lying half-concealed beneath glossy creepers, collapsed or abandoned or bomb-scared in the middle of a run, its cargo of soil filled with treasures or with worms. Ernest would have stood here and directed operations, brush in hand, overwhelmed by the amphorae, the bones from burial jars, the carvings and sculptures that sifted up in such generous and extraordinary numbers. “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” he wondered.

“Or l’essence d’une nation est que tous les individus aient beaucoup de choses en commun, est aussi que tous aient oublié bien des choses”. There is, indeed, so much here both forgotten and remembered, by accident or by design. And what of these nations, that have ebbed and flowed like so many watery pools through the seasons, their populations evolving, migrating or perishing? They have not died, but their elements both treasured and neglected have become the property of their successors, who add their own brand of manipulation to the mixture. Lebanese history schoolbooks stop in 1946. After the civil war, new books were planned, but the committee factions could not agree on the correct way the nation’s youth should be taught to remember the events of their country’s past, starting with that Arab coming (invasion? occupation? rape?) in 636, let alone those around the war that they had just lived through.

The ancients themselves knew a thing or two about memory:

As early as 4000 BC, an Egyptian god was endowed with the responsibility for controlling memory, as was the Greek goddess Mnemosyne, one of Zeus’s wives and the mother of the Muses. Memory was placed in the hands of deities because it was thought to defy logical analysis.

They can hardly have envisioned how their grand designs would come to rest. But here they are, looking out over a Maronite sea while tourists sit in the replica amphitheatre and hold hands and behave irritatingly, historians try to remember their festivals and gods for them, and Lebanese Christians adopt their achievements as their own to explain their superiority over their Muslim brothers and sisters. Imagining it in another eight thousand years’ time is as impossible as the present reality.

My guidebook tells me what is what, but it doesn’t explain anything. It doesn’t explain how this came to be, or why, or whether Ernest Renan wore a thobe or a straw hat with a jaunty brim, or if he shared a nargileh with his workers at the end of the day.

But in Jbeil, you can imagine it how you would wish it to have been. Take your time. Have a seat on a stone from one of those eight thousand years and watch the world. Look at the sea, and listen, and smell the salt at last.