Next Stop, Nowhere. The Lebanese countryside is awash in reminders of the... (Majdal Balhis, Béqaa, Lebanon)
Next Stop, Nowhere. The Lebanese countryside is awash in reminders of the country’s long and storied past, so it was no surprise that as we walked from Rashaya to Aaitanit one long and surprisingly warm early spring day, the theme would become the transience of life. The remembrance of things past began with the tombs of Druze holy men that we circled around on our way down the hill from the honey-coloured shrine of Sheikh el-Fadel in the village of Kawkaba Bu Arab. It continued with the cluster of simple, rock-cut Greco-Phoenician tombs we explored on a hillside nearby shortly afterwards and then returned to more current times with the discovery of old, Syrian army trenches in the hills above Lake Qaraoun and a half-destroyed Israeli Merkava on display on its shore. Each site had something different to say. The Druze tombs spoke of remembrance, the Phoenician tombs of forgetting. The crumbling Syrian trenches spoke of occupation, the battered Israeli tank of resistance. Of all the traces of history we saw that day, none moved me quite as much and this old banger we found abandoned by the side of the road in Majdal Balhiss. Overlooked, unloved and defeated, it radiated a perceptible melancholy, a yearning, from the way it was facing, to be anywhere that day but where it was.
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