gates were bolted shut, and in front stood three Druze guards, all armed with Kalashnikovs. They were warming their hands around a spluttering brazier, with their guns slung casually from the shoulders of their damp greatcoats. The driver got out and talked to them, saying that I was a friend of Jumblatt. They immediately bowed and pushed open the gates.
Through the gatehouse, in the fading light, the palace felt like a Cambridge college out of term time: echoing, empty courtyards led one into another, damp with fallen leaves and swept by sudden gusts of rain. In the centre of the principal courtyard lay a low black marble monument to Kemal Jumblatt, Walid's assassinated father. The guard led me past it, and turning on his flashlight, conducted me down, through a narrow warren of dark passageways, into the drafty vaulted basements that had once been the palace stables and dungeons.
The guard fumbled for a switch. Suddenly the great arcaded underpass was lit up by racks of powerful spotlights. I had been expecting a modest collection of interesting new finds, but nothing had prepared me for the wonderful quantity of Byzantine artwork Jumblatt had managed to save. There, laid out on the walls and on the floor, in room after vaulted room, unstudied by scholars, unknown to the outside world, lay what is without doubt the most magnificent collection of Byzantine floor mosaics to survive to the present day outside the city of Byzantium itself: more than thirty large, room-sized mosaics dating from the mid-sixth century, and as many smaller fragments. It was a truly extraordinary abundance of fine late antique art, certainly one of the very greatest Byzantine finds to have come to light this century.
The Porphyreon mosaic-makers appear to have been influenced less by Imperial fashions in the capital - where, judging by the floors in the Great Palace, gory hunting and gladiatorial scenes were
de rigueur
- than by work from contemporary monastic sites in Byzantine Palestine. They too used relatively large tesserae and show a preference for geometric subjects over figurative ones. Most of the mosaics are filled with intricate patterns:
trompe I'oeil
based on interlocking cross-shapes, hypnotic swirls of peltas, chevrons, swastikas and key patterns. Some of these interlace patterns resemble similar designs on fragments of floor mosaic from the Byzantine monastery of St Stephen, just outside the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. Others contain tangles of vine-scroll ornament closely paralleled by a lovely mosaic that decorated the great Armenian monastery which once stood a short distance from St Stephen. One of the mosaics in the basement depicts a mallard and two ducks resting on a lilypond in a style very close to the mosaic of the River Nile at Tabgha on the Sea of Galilee. The link to Palestine is therefore striking, and it seems entirely possible that the same
atelier
of mosaic-makers served both northern Palestine and what is now southern Lebanon.
The somewhat austere choice of subject-matter almost certainly represents a conscious reaction against the sort of voluptuous late Roman pavements discovered outside Antioch and Carthage. On these mosaics plump, disrobed goddesses sport with hoary satyrs, while gods and demi-gods, Hercules and Dionysus, lie befuddled on their couches, overflowing rhytons raised in the air as they engage in riotous drinking contests: hardly the sort of scheme to appeal to ascetic early Christian monks. What is perhaps more unexpected is that the Porphyreon mosaics also represent a striking contrast to the worldly triumphalism of the Imperial panels at Ravenna, where the apse walls of San Vitale are filled with magnificent depictions of Byzantine court ceremonial: long lines of Justinian's world-weary bishops and sycophantic courtiers, flanked by Theodora's urbane and gossipy ladies with their gold and pearls and silks.
Instead there is something decidedly puritanical in the spirit of Porphyreon, a spirit which mirrors the often austere monastic outlook of John Moschos. Indeed they are products of the same world. Several of the mosaics have inscriptions which reveal them to date from exactly the period Moschos was collecting material for
The Spiritual Meadow.
One inscription shows that the mosaic - a series of interlocking lozenges containing bears, storks, stags and a gazelle - was commissioned as a memorial 'for the rest of the soul of Elias' in December 594/595
a . d
. In other words it is quite possible that both John Moschos and the men from Porphyreon that he mentions in
The Spiritual Meadow
- Procopius the lawyer and Abba Zosimos the Cilician - could have seen some of these mosaics being made, and may even have walked over their gleaming, newly-laid tesserae.
Yet the feature that is perhaps most interesting about the work at Porphyreon is the mosaic-makers' strong preference for the geometric over the figurative. Of sixty-three mosaics, only three depict the human figure: one shows a female saint holding a cloth; another shows a saint (presumably John the Baptist) standing in water and holding a staff; while the third is a personification of Ktisis ('Creation'), shown holding a spear and surrounded by a group of animals - bulls, bears, leopards and a lion. The sixty other mosaics are all, without exception, aniconic and non-figurative.
This is important, for it emphasises quite how far taste was already moving away from the humanism, gaiety and decadence of the late classical world towards the cold and inward-looking intensity of early medieval Byzantium. This was a spirit which was to lead directly to the violent iconoclasm of the eighth and ninth centuries: only fifty years after the completion of the Elias mosaic, the Byzantine Emperor Leo III ordered the smashing of all icons and figurative
ars sacra
across the Christian Empire.
Nor was Byzantium the only force to be affected by this change of feeling: one of the Porphyreon mosaics, dated 500, was laid at exactly the period that an Arab trader from Mecca was touring the Levant, talking to and disputing with Byzantine monks, and formulating his own - thoroughly disapproving - ideas about the depiction of living creatures. The prohibition on reproducing the human form that Mohammed was later to impose on all Muslims still affects a billion people today, and it is fascinating to see the roots of that unease - a feeling that to depict man, to erect graven images, was somehow pagan and obscene - clearly apparent in these mosaics. Certainly the exuberance and vivacity of late antique and early Christian work - the crowding of living forms, of horsemen and their quarry, leaping lions, fleeing gazelles, the Emperor and his consorts, even the querulous saints and the prophets of the Ravenna baptistries - have already given way to a cold, carpet-like abstraction. The birds in the vine tendrils are still and silent and two-dimensional; a chill has descended, and left the mosaics frozen, arrested. There is no movement, no noise. The Bacchic riot of Antioch and the courtly trumpets of Ravenna have been stilled.
I spent two hours in the dungeons of the palace, closely examining the mosaics, astonished by their stern beauty and their fantastically intricate and abstract detailing. Porphyreon was clearly still a prosperous place at a period when most of the other trading ports of the Levant were already in fast decline, and presumably this prosperity was linked to the olive-oil mills that the archaeologists dug up in their rescue excavations. After all, oil was a very valuable commodity, needed by cities around the Mediterranean for both cooking and lamplight, and its price was clearly marked up considerably in the process. St Augustine, used to the cheap oil of his rural North African childhood, could not believe the cost of lamp oil when he arrived in Rome for the first time, and complained bitterly about the expense it imposed on reading at night. But as the rich spread of mosaic-work around me demonstrated, the merchants of Porphyreon had used their profits well.
Carried away by the thrill of being one of the first ever to see these mosaics, I lost all sense of time. But quite suddenly, I was brought back to reality by the sound of a loud explosion outside. The noise echoed around the vaults for several seconds before finally dying away.
'What was that?' I asked the guard.
'It is nothing,' he replied casually, sucking on his cigarette. 'Just the planes of the Israelis.' 'A sonic boom?'
'They make the noise deliberately,' he said. 'Once, twice a day.' 'Why?'
'Just to remind us,' said the guard. 'Just to remind us that they are still there. Just to remind us what they can still do.'
Hotel Ch'baat, Bsharre, northern Lebanon,
4
October
Everyone I talked to seemed to agree. If I wanted to understand the Maronites there was one place I had to go: Bsharre.
In the cliffs below the town, deep in the Qannubin gorge, the first Maronite hermits had taken shelter when they were driven out of Syria by Byzantine persecution in the sixth century. Fourteen hundred years later, at the end of the nineteenth century, the town produced the Maronites' most famous poet and writer: Khalil Gibran, author of
The Prophet.
This at any rate was what Maronites told me about Bsharre, and what I read in my trusty
Lebanon: The Promised Land of Tourism.
Non-Maronites also said that I should go to Bsharre, but for rather different reasons. They seemed to regard the town as a sort of Maronite Heart of Darkness, pointing out that Bsharre was the home of the notorious Samir Geagea, and the place from which he drew his most loyal and bloodthirsty troops. If Geagea was the man who for the final stages of the war led the Phalange militiamen who committed mass murder at Sabra and Chatila (as well as slightly smaller and less notorious massacres at two other Palestinian camps, Tel el-Za'atar and Ein Helweh), and who gunned down two of his principal Maronite rivals in their beds, then many of the men who actually performed these atrocities could no doubt now be found sipping mint tea in Bsharre's cafes and bars.
The unusual proportion of psychotics in Bsharre's population seemed to be emphasised by another story I was told. It concerned what happened when, on his death bed, Kahlil Gibran left Bsharre all the royalties from
The Prophet,
then running at an astonishing $1 million annually. The gift did not have the beneficial effect he presumably hoped for. Instead the two rival Maronite clans that dominate Bsharre, the Kayruz and the Tawq, broke into open warfare over the division of the money. For many months the town was plunged into its own miniature civil war, with bombings, assassinations, murders and exchanges of heavy mortar-fire. According to my informants, it was that battle over the profits of a book of mystic poetry, not the words of gentle counsel offered by Gibran, that represented the true face of this town at the heart of the Maronite world.
One Maronite academic friend of mine, now a don at Oxford, also warned me about the primitive behaviour of the people of Bsharre. A couple of years ago he had been sitting on the verandah of a bar in the town, watching the sun going down and drinking a glass of beer with a colleague. Suddenly, from a balcony immediately behind him, a double-barrelled anti-aircraft gun opened up, firing volley after volley into the air. Assuming some sort of air raid was in progress, my friend took shelter behind a nearby wall. But when, after five minutes, no aircraft appeared and the gun continued firing, he darted along the road, climbed up the stairs and knocked on the door of the flat to try to find out what was going on.
'Are you crazy?' he said when the door was opened. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'
'I'm sorry,' replied the man with the anti-aircraft gun. 'I've just heard that my daughter in Australia has had a baby boy. It is my first grandson. I am so happy.'
As there appeared to be no functioning public transport in Lebanon, to get to Bsharre I was forced to again hire the services of Nouri Suleiman, the extremely expensive taxi driver who took me to Beit ed-Din. Nouri is a septuagenarian former swimming champion who has been taking people around Lebanon since he won the Lebanese national lottery in the 1950s; he spent the money on a new Mercedes which, he tells me proudly, he is still driving forty years later.