In the country of legend, legends are born… dreams lead on to other dreams…
1- In the country of legend legends are born.
Dreams lead on to other dreams, and poetry takes on substance and reality.
This country has kept alive the first glow of Creation.
Distant echoes reach us, and these are the voice of the Creator.
An aged creature comes from afar, from the frontiers of time and from the depths of history.
An old man, with white beard, advancing under a heavy burden:
Would he be, as Adam was, formed from the first clay by his Maker?
Who are you, old man, and what is this load you carry,
From where do you come, pray tell me!
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I come from the ancient frontiers of time, and if I come to a halt then the wheels of time cease to turn.
The trees that grow on these mountains are given glory in ancient writings and in Holy Scripture itself. I am the Keeper, the Keeper of the Cedars, the Keeper of Lebanon and its mystery.
As for knowing the nature of my burden, which to you seems so heavy, let me tell you that it is the great legend of mankind inscribed by the greatest invention that man ever conceived: I mean Writing, the cursive script of the Phoenicians now everywhere known.
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WRITING! These letters, chariots of the Spirit, carriers of thought, they are the signs that starting from the Land of the Cedars I scatter far and wide, sowing them across the world, that I may help mankind to know love.
My calling has been to make Knowledge universal, the fruit of learning. Through these signs, Socrates, Virgil, Michael-Angelo, Shakespeare and others countless have expressed their genius. I am the carrier of Truth, of Light, and of the Spirit.
This burden was entrusted to me, and is the charge on my descendants, you the Lebanese. To be Lebanese means to inherit this vocation of mine and to continue to merit the gift of God.
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In the Orient of Old its people were given gods that were harsh, thirsting for blood, to whom brothers and sons and daughters were sacrificed. The tragedy of Abraham finished with the ram, sacrificed to appease Almighty God.
And our God, that of our forebears, who breathed Life into matter, came to offer himself! He himself come amongst us, Emmanu-El, from where the phrase so full of poetry, To offer one’s heart!
Our past was the witness of the birth of Conscience, and from there as the Spirit cast its first light the history of Humanity took shape.
Homo sapiens, shaper of tools and creator of the arts, has left us the traces of his early kind, there, in a cave, where now is Antelias.
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Do you see, O Lucien of Samosata, these happy people, hospitable, friendly and handsome? They are God’s handiwork.
Since ancient times, they have shown themselves civilized. Know, O Lucien, that I happen to meet them often.
My mission is to straddle both the planet and time, to soar over History and to sow Evolution by making Love known.
Our inventive genius has made easy communication of thought and the writing down of the events that unroll. Our genius of learning has been borne by universality. If now our fellow-men can gather up history by computerized inscription, the achievement of our time, it is the fruit of our own invention. We acknowledge here our access to the universal that conquers time.
Our school existed long before that of Charlemagne.
If one may put on a disk all the history of existence, it is only because the tide of the alphabet, parting from Babylon and defined in Phoenicia, has spread throughout all mankind, crossing the centuries.
From this little crossroad, we have invaded the planet, soil and soul, by the gift of writing. What magic is this!
We have given memory to mankind, keeping its content until today.
The World has found its refuge in the letters, natural frontier of Being, just as the saints find refuge in prayer and in their Lord.
The tide of knowledge has been transmitted since early times by the great masters of thought, our parish priests. The thoroughly Maronite and Lebanese tradition of the school under the oak tree is not a recent one.
Writing, flowing from our shores, has spread without limit.
What magic is this invention which has given mankind its memory and conserved it for man ever since!
2- Consider this valley with its hanging gardens, where flow the pure and crystalline waters of Nahr el-Kelb.
Distant music bids us welcome, accompanied by human voices.
My love is for ever, forever shall I love you.
While the night lasts and the moon gazes down,
Happiness and joy overwhelm me.
The look in your eyes so clear entrance me,
Your breasts seem to awaken,
And your burning lips are my vault of heaven.
Drink flows in abundance, while the gracious Muses dance and sing, virgins of my country!
Celestial springs, nectar of the gods, blood of the Creator,
White gold of Lebanon!
Let us clink our glasses and drink, for now is the feast!
Drink and mezze invite us to dine.
In the human warmth of the crowd that presses around, our daughters are the pride of our mountains.
Their beauty stirs our blood and inspiration takes us to the heights.
No more place for inertia, the stir of life calls us to take part.
Everywhere is action, flute and tambourine accompany the voices.
The dance, the fire, all bring back the history of this valley.
The great conquerors of the world came to a halt here.
They drank the sacred water of these caverns now become famous.
A monastery of prayer has been built on the heights that dominate the valley of Nahr el-Kelb!
The very feast is a form of prayer.
3- Let us now leave the often chilly gorges of Nahr el-Kelb with its blue-gray humid shadows where grow trees of every kind, where vegetation is so rich with anemones abounding, let us come out into the world of light and go down to the beach of golden sand.
There are only a few steps to take before reaching the fairy-like bay encircled by rising mountains.
On the first hill stands the statue of Christ the King, protecting the universe in his outstretched arms, and on a higher summit overlooking the sea is another gleaming white form, Our Lady of Harissa.
Do you know, dear Lucien of Samosata, this religion where God the All-High has taken for himself a mother?
This Lady of ours is his mother.
The eternal feminine is symbolized by the whiteness of the Virgin Mother of Our Lord, whom all the daughters of the mountain adore, with her serenity, purity, goodness, beauty, tenderness, sweetness, and smile reflected in the faces of our maidens bubbling over with idealism , fantasy and poetry.
The history of their religions so dear to the peoples of the Orient is like the history of the civilizations. They have a beginning and an end, they resist the attacks of time and they change with the times, for religion is implanted in time.
Here the role of the woman is dominant, vital, radical, since she is part of the social and human body. Is she not the other half? And are the two halves not equal?
Let us look to the left, one of the most beautiful scenes in the world.
Let us approach; this swarm of people on the beach takes me far back in time.
And the bathing girls? I too have a weakness for the beauty of the naiads on whom all the grace of God has come down to shape. Are they so many Helens of Troy? Or fairies? Is there a Beatrice, a Leila, a Juliet, an Astarte, a Diana among them?
Here are the Maronites.
Animators of the history of the Orient and of Arab Islam?
Literature, the arts, exchange, song, poetry, reforms, democracy, liberties and the rights of man.
Modern man was born here, from Antelias to Golgotha, the Christian revolution of the saints and of love from the day when freedom was born, the trees that spring from our soil also factors in civilization.
A prayer reaches us from some monastery afar off, listen to the peal of our bells.
All this has survived the coming of tyrants, Berber, Arab, Ottoman, Egyptian and others.
Hordes come from all sides to murder our soil!
Cities raised to the ground, peoples massacred, civilizations destroyed, trees uprooted.
The Spirit protests, believing in the Resurrection, ever since El’ and Adonis and the Phoenix.
Everything regains life and is resuscitated.
Land of the saints, land of love, of liberty, the force of the flowing sap gives you ever more vigor and impetus.
People of Lebanon, you build your own destiny, you play the game of your life.
4- Now let us go further north, towards the other curve of the bay, along the old Roman road. Here we come to the Roman bridge.
Still standing to tell its story, the story of lovers, in the land of love, land of pilgrims and land of goatherds – and there is one of them, watching his animals scattered over the rocks, so many black living dots, a goatherd with many skills, agricultural and veterinary, a craftsman, an industrialist, a merchant!
We are all of us goatherds. Let us go in the shade and take a short rest.
A hundred yards away from where we are seated we can enter another world, for there is the Casino!
It receives from all five continents, this other world, this squat building catering to leisure and to the passing of time.
In front of us is Ghazir, fief of the clan of the Hobeish, of the Shehabs and of the guardian of the Royal Library of the Escorial and of many others.
Here Renan once wrote his Jesus.
Dear Lucien, every corner, every stone, has its tale to tell of greatness, its mythology, and its secrets.
The little bay where the fishermen’s boats are lulled by the waves has memories of Saint Paul, the great Christian strategist.
From here he took ship to evangelize Europe.
Saint Paul covered all Lebanon, to finally stop at Tabarja before heading towards the pagan Empire of Rome to proclaim to it the Good News and to open for it the way to freedom, with abolition of slavery, and to spread brotherly love over the world.
There is another cleft further north, a deeper one, a hunting-ground unlike any other, with overpowering cliffs, waterfalls tumbling vertically down, and trees lost in the dizzy space, sometimes so dense that the light can scarcely pierce their branches. Inside the valley one feels dwarfed by the immensity, the grandeur of the place. The silence imposes respect, for we are in a holy valley, a valley of gods and of saints.
5- With his bow in his hand and the quiver of arrows at his belt, the hunter senses danger and his nerves are stretched. For what happened to the god of the hunt, and of love, himself?
Well-built, strong of body and soul, combining wisdom with physical force, ambition with primitive vigor, this hunter, urged on by love, adored by gods and by men, breathed deeply of the air of the valley, an air which fills the lungs to their depths.
Space here knows no limits, like the depths of consciousness.
Adonis came from the depths of the past, the most beautiful of the gods.
Astarte was his idol, his guardian angel, and had followed him when he went out on the hunt.
In this valley, the hunt is something holy.
But the forces of evil are always there, alert and waiting. Since they know neither rest nor sleep, their night follows day and their mission is to redden the waters of this sacred river, always on the prowl for victims. This story goes far, far back, many thousands of years.
Suddenly, in the moment when the gods themselves are abandoned by their guardian genii, a fierce wild boar with terrible force charges the young god and mortally wounds him.
His pure and holy blood flows over the ground. The river is dyed purple-red, and all Nature goes into mourning, for the god has died.
The sun hides itself, all is in tears. Nahr Ibrahim is the river of weeping. The tears also of Astarte, and the women and maidens of Byblos, performs their Adonisiac. The god is dead.
The earth abundant drinks in the blood of the god and Astarte almost dies of sorrow.
The seasons follow the seasons, and after the long nights and cold of winter comes spring, Nature awakens and Adonis is resurrected.
The pure soul of Adonis returns to life and flowers in all Nature, for this is the day of resurrection, of renewal and of youth found again.
6- Two river mouths, two rivers, two fairylike caverns, Afka and Jeita.
They set the limits to Kesrouan to the north and to the south.
The Mediterranean laps its shore to the west, and the most beautiful of mountains rises on its east. This is Sannine, a mountain that lives, that may be seen to follow the rhythms of the sun, every minute changing its shades of color with varied tints.
Here is a land of legend, of dreams, of myths, of poems and of endeavor, a land of gods, of heroes, and of men, for whom toil is delight, for fable becomes reality.
One can write nothing more perfect, more poetic, more imbued with life, than the description of Nahr Ibrahim, the river of Adonis, with its wild waters, furious and foaming, hurtling down.
How enthralling is the epic of the human race!
Human endeavor reveals the pioneer spirit of its time.
The Lebanese work with passion for an eternal goal.
Their human fabric adapts to every change and contrast.
In the beginning was the Logos, the Word of God. Once this people was like any other, but there was also a difference.
The yeast that was the ferment of this people came straight from the Word.
This is the month of March and of April, the beginning of Holy Week, with fasting, mortification, sacrifice and prayer, with chant and with psalmody.
Almighty God, Creator of the Cosmos, Creator of Time, of Beauty, of Light, God of mankind, and muse inspirer of poets, protector of the seasons, animator of souls, we implore you, protect our children and our homes, give us back this son Adonis and the spirit of Adonis.
You see, Lucien, these ceremonies go to my head and make me feel involved.
I have known Adonis, son of the Cosmos, reborn on the soil of Lebanon with the April air.
All nature awakes, beauty of abundant blossom.
The sap rises through the stems, giving all that is green a new verdure, fresh and vital. The blood courses through our veins, in the gracious young damsels decked with flowers who dance in the spring air, celebrating the renewal of life in the world.
As for the men, dear Lucien, they meditate, plunged deep in their own thoughts, in union with the resurrection of the Son of God.
The smiles have gone from the faces, but the kindness and tenderness have added to their expression.
A Holy Week, once again there is rejoicing. God is among us, and no desert separates man from God.
God is with man, close to men, as one of them.
Dear Lucien, the wild boar is forgotten,
As the false prophets are forgotten, and their victims, the lost sheep that we love.
Life goes on for the rest of the year, and the feast-days follow on like the seasons, like the blessed waters of our two rivers.
7- Look, Lucien, here we are!
Here at the western extremity of that chain of mountains stretching from Zion to Hermon, from Sannine to Kornet es-Sawda. Other mountains raise their heads, the Pyramids, the Iron Mountain, the Mountain of Moses, and yet others, and what a mighty rampart do these chains form! Facing the Bedouin on his horse or his camel, the hordes which sweep all before them, riding like the wind, without pity or fear, sowing terror, capture, rape and death, there stood only one hurdle on their way over the plateau extending from Iran named Persia, over Iraq and over Syria, the wall of the mountains of Lebanon.
They had to pass this first obstacle before they reached the second one, the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean shore and the plain, they are like light and darkness, and between them is twilight, a twilight seething with life.
‘Twixt the river mouth and the plain there is every exchange, from the valley of Adonis to the great Heliopolis; the temples of Mithras rise in succession, to be replaced by the churches, so many of them bearing the names of the prophet Elias or of Our Lady.
Yes, the prophet Elias lives again in every Lebanese soul, that Elias who revolted and said No! to the impious King Achab.
Long caravans of mules, of donkeys and of camels brought on their banks merchandise and offerings, then bought, paid and bore away. Communication means exchange.
For the departure, the arrival and the return one thing was needed, the blessing and help of the gods, a prayer offered before the temple, with vows and with thanks.
The children came running to welcome these caravans, while the young people of of around Byblos awaited news of their lovers at Baalbek Heliopolis.
Our produce of every kind journeyed all over this limitless plateau. From this sack, dear Lucien, as we approach the Metropolis, let us scatter its content in the sacred water of the torrent, that the water polluted by this virus of knowledge may spread through the seas, the oceans, the islands, the continents, that all Creation may be touched by it that it might be the one bond uniting mankind.
After Golgotha, the day when the blood of the Lord God flowed on the planet, all ties of blood were wiped out that one bond of love, of truth, of justice, of equality and of freedom might unite all men to their Creator.
You know, Lucien, these descendants of Abraham, of Isaac and Ishmaël still believe in these stories of ties of blood and of different races.
Help me, Lucien, for I have lapses of memory at my age, the age of all time; you know I am old, so help me to describe. What is it that marks the soul of this country, this people, this Lebanon, these Lebanese?
What can one say of God and of his saints?
A people with energy? Hospitable and friendly? Supple, obstinate, fearing no challenge? Open, giving their heart even to the ungrateful, lucid and cheerful, generous and vital, hard as the blacksmith and gentle as doves?
With moral values, a people just.
Help me to walk, Lucien, so that with this freeing breath I may animate the earth, the sun and the light.
Rude workers of metal, steady in action, men of all trades like the goatherd with his skills.
With a spirit of sacrifice even reaching martyrdom.
With the mysticism of work, always a prayer.
Mystical worker.
Saints and hermit monks. Truth to tell, we are all monks, monk goatherds and goatherd monks.
To walk in the early dawn at the fourth hour of the morn under the gentle rays of Venus, the shepherd’s star, star of love, this is most beautiful in the land of the cedars, bathed in moonlight, in yellow and orange rays from a moon at arm’s reach.
8- Wake up, dear Lucien, let us continue, but we leave these places with regret where we sleep, dream and meditate near the sacred water, beside the stream.
The light intensifies with a glowing blue, ever stronger. On the horizon a clear line is drawn.
The wind murmurs on the coast as we make our way along mysterious paths half overgrown.
What pleasure is this, we forget weariness, sweat and thirst!
The stars are no more to be seen, they fade like the civilizations of the past, just a few planets cast their last rays and then are lost.
Between Adonis and Byblos the land is more open, the hills rise less high, and the horizons stretch farther.
The fruit trees are still many and varied, and we see terraces of banana trees, orange trees, almond trees, olive trees and carob trees, while to our left the fishermen draw their daily sustenance, coming from an ancient past and having seen the history of many civilizations.
They ever hope for stronger health in a universe temple of God.
The universe is a paradise of holiness and here one senses the pleasures of silence, hearing the bells inviting the faithful to prayer, for from Beirut to Byblos we see everywhere the outline of the belfries of our churches.
These are so simple, some stones and a bell under a holy cross, this cross to be seen as far as the Cosmos.
It may be seen in every source of light.
It is the Cross of the Cosmos, made flesh on earth in the Word to bear high the germ of the soul which is divine, with upraised arms praying in the realms of the heavens where the dialogue with the Creator is touching in an act sublime.
It is only at Byblos that a first minaret shows its outline. Here the faithful eager for Allah call him with all their strength of soul.
You know, Lucien, Renan and his friends followed this very same road.
Lamartine, Gérard de Nervard, Flaubert, Barrès and others.
Europeans and conquerors, Alexander, Pompey, the Greeks and the Romans, going from North to South and from South to North.
Happy would I have been to land in Byblos from a boat, a boat of dreams rocked by the waves of my soul.
My heart trembles, Lucien, I am moved, I am joyful to see Byblos before me.
The tears run down my cheeks.
Words fail me, I am totally united to God on this sacred world that I love as the gods of old loved it.
What a great idea was yours, Lucien, when you compared Byblos to a giant hand, with its center the palm and the roads to its outskirts so many fingers.
Yes, paths that run from the heart out to the great spaces of heaven.
The old city lies in the middle and the many homes stretch out on every side.
Here is a people of fishermen, settled eight thousand years ago around a providential well of water, a place easy to defend, where over this vast period some five or six civilizations have come and gone.
South-west of the hillock lies the earliest primitive village, with floors of smoothed clay and chalk for the tents of the fishermen, cattle-raisers and hunters; then there are the first true houses of the ages of bronze and of iron. Here began the great epic of the Phoenician galleys, their bows plowing everywhere the seas before they returned to the
temples of the gods and to the palaces of the kings with their proud hypogea.
Let us stop here, for today we are called. We are invited, for here each passer-by is made welcome. Hospitality is the absolute rule. Generosity is a tradition, everyone feels at ease, a group of women, girls or men seated under a vine whose roots are in the soil and whose bunches of grapes are in paradise, this paradise which Fra Angelico or this springtime of Botticelli. The Edenic dream becomes daily reality. Over every doorway there spreads a vine to enchant you.
The terrace is another world, as in a legend of princes. Flowers of every kind surround us. We are received with open arms and served coffee and sweetmeats and succulent fruit, as we sit shaded against the trunk of a tree. Nearby, an ass is attached with her little foal.
And in the harbor we visualize the triremes and counters of yore.
Joseph Matar
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Translated from French: K.J.Mortimer
