Laqlouq

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, and perhaps understandably tending to conspiracy theories. Given the popularity of these theories, it is mildly surprising that the people have not attributed the travails of their ski industry this season to anything more sinister than unfortunate weather patterns. On other topics, the current favourite circling the office is the idea that the sorry passenger plane which fell into the sea in flames last month was the victim of a renegade Shi’ite faction, who apparently have nothing better to do with their time than aim at Boeings full of Ethiopians in the middle of a thunderstorm. Cautious and sensitively phrased skepticism (Bollocks!) is met with a generous effort to enlighten the innocent foreigner. Eh bas anjad ya Ellen, if it was just one side saying it then maybe it would not be true, but everyone is saying it, really, from every side. Perhaps the newly discovered black box will settle the question. In the meantime, photos of grinning schoolchildren throwing flowers insincerely into the Mediterranean proliferate on the Internet; vivid orange gerberas against dark waves and cold sands. A cartoon is censored from the press that shows a Lebanese lady telling her friend how news of the crash reduced her maid to tears:

Why should she care, if she’s Filipina?

It turns out I was taken in – she’s not Filipina after all, but Ethiopian!

The horror! What will you do, get rid of her?

No, don’t worry, I just lowered her salary from a Filipina to an Ethiopian one.

But anyway, for now, the snow is here, even if a couple of months late. Long tired of the effusions of snowbound Brits that blend so rapidly into sour and then hysterical complaints, I am falling over myself to head as far as possible into the mountains and to taste at last the fresh winter air. The troops are marshaled, the expedition booked, the warm bed left at an ungodly Sunday morning hour. Now is the time to turn your eyes back on Lebanon from its peaks, while the whiteness lends a miraculous beauty to the ravaged hills, and distance generously distils the coast from calcified ridges of smoke and concrete into nothing more the gentle curve of a hand through the sand at the water’s edge; a momentary cupping of the blue and infinitesimal moulding of the shore.

Such a small country, Lebanon, and so troubled, from the maps always seeming to be shouldered into the sea by its neighbours. Beyond the hazy rim of its sea coast the land is all earth and rock flung up into tense peaks and valleys, that only calm themselves when they collapse into the plains of Damascus. The country is permanently ridged like the back of a snarling dog, a terrier holding clumsy bloodhounds at bay. And so, this Sunday, from the Valley of the Dog (or Wolf), we rise along the spines of the hills, fold on bare and unbeautiful fold, until the hasty squares of houses that have destroyed the beauty they set out to exploit* are sensibly covered with several feet of glorious white, and our breath plumes in the air. In Laqlouq, with disappointingly Early Learning Centre-esque snowshoes^§ in jaunty bright plastics strapped to our feet, the blinding light and flawless whiteness beckon us irresistibly into the hills.

And this is the way to be, surely, when trudging along the edges of frozen lakes and up the ridges and along the sides of things, all swoops and arches and rearing crests, gives way to the view back along the great sweeping bowl of the valley and to the haughty peaks beyond. Nothing has tracked here today but things with fur and whiskers, that have left hysterical lines of single-minded paw prints behind them. Sometimes they trail across great blank expanses towards the cliffs, as if Lebanon had a visiting population of suicidal lemmings, here to experience death in the snows.

How to speak of these days but with big, clumsy, obvious words, that say nothing and yet everything, because this is the simplest and most dramatic landscape, the mountain stage cloaked and cleaned into a temporary parallel world. It is very big, and very white, and very bright, beneath a Disney bluebird sky.

Here and there, a talon of rusty metal or curve of black plastic pipe like the hump of an ice-age serpent hints at the landscape beneath, reminding us that these hills have a more practical everyday reality. After all, we are walking through commercial man-made orchards, and this is Lebanon – if you can’t build on it, put a crucifix on it, so that not a single inch of this land shall be left untouched by the absurdity of men.

The trudging changes its tune as the trail we create on the sparkling surface turns downhill, and we shuffle and slide with a little more brio along the flank of the valley, edging along icy falling water and guarded by brittle ranks of icicles suspended from the stepped and crumbling slopes. If you fall behind the group for a while and still the squeaking of your shoes against the snow, you can find the silence that seems impossible anywhere else in Lebanon. Pause for a moment and let the wind carry you away a little, over a slumbering shoulder of the beast of the hill, to where nothing mutters or stirs but the beating of your own heart. This could be the frozen land of an oriental Snow Queen, vain and terrible. But as in all good stories, the hardy juniper trees show dark and strong even far away above, the wild roses are heavy with dark red hips and shy with nudging buds, and the black skeleton orchards of apple and pear sleep in tidy lines on the valley floor that promise fruitfulness and colour, come a different season.

The descent from Laqlouq is as it ever is from the worlds away that Lebanon stores for you, stores it does not do to forget. The air thickens with pollution, the lights grow more garish, concrete noses the snow away like a blind and ugly beast snouting through the hills. Tomorrow looms. Days afterwards, climbing another unbearable stretch of dust-fogged tarmac in Mansourieh, I glimpse pale cyclamens clustering together in teardrops of faintest lilac beneath a clawed-away hunk of cliff, banked about with empty water bottles and otherwise unidentifiable litter. For a moment, distant voices seem to chime through the ponderous white noise of the cars, singing of a lost world, innumerable lost years, and of a thousand lost mountainsides that are never cloaked with snow, that are never allowed to forget, even for a short season.

* Thubron again. (I am obsessed. He is particularly amusing on the topic of monks with beards.)

^§ They still call them raquettes, but I had been imagining something rather more rustic in wood and leather, so the disappointment was probably just as well.