Colin Thubron - The Hills of Adonis

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Contents

Colin Thubron is the master of classic travel writing, and a previous winner of the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. His first writing was about the Middle East Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. In 1982 he travelled all over Russia in an ancient Morris Marina pursued at every stage by the KGB. From these early experiences developed his travel books: Among the Russians, Behind the Wall, The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia and Shadow of the Silk Road (all available in Vintage). So great is his dedication to travelling in Russia and China, that he has learned Russian and Mandarin in order to be able to speak to ordinary people en route.

Colin Thubron is also a prize-winning novelist. He lives in London.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the publishers of the following works for permission to reprint excerpts: The Poems of Sappho, trs. P. Maurice Hill (Staples Press); The Greek Bucolic Poets, trs. A. S. F. Gow (C.U.P.); The Iliad, Homer, trs. E. V. Rieu (Penguin Books); Theocritus, Bion and Moschus, trs. Arthur S. Way (C.U.P.); The Syrian Goddess, Lucian, trs. Prof. Herbert A. Strong (Constable & Co.); and to Miss Kathleen Raine for the lines from The Goddess from Living in Time (Poetry London, Nicholson & Watson, 1946).

Preface

This four-month walk through the mountains and coasts of Lebanon describes a world irrecoverably gone. Already in 1967 the countrys fragile unity was showing strain, and some were saying that the survival of its delicately balanced government into the 1970s would be a miracle.

Yet in the spring of 1967 the land was still at peace, and it was possible for a young man (I was twenty-seven) to vanish alone into the mountains. The peoples I found there Maronites, Druses, Shiites have since become familiar through press report and atrocity. But in 1967 they existed only as little-known minorities in a quiet nation. As I travelled among them, intoxicated by their countrys past, I received only intimations of the storm in the near future.

So this journey belongs to a time of innocence both Lebanons and mine. Fleetingly it may recapture the beauty of that ravaged country and the people who used to live there in peace.

1. The Quest

Of all the gods conceived by ancient men, the last to pass away were those divinities of sun and earth who dominated the Semitic world. Because they represented most nearly the needs and instincts of mankind, they remained behind long after their images had been broken: rebellious, archetypal giants.

Such a deity was the love goddess, born between the Two Rivers, who came to Lebanon and wedded with a corn spirit. The Semites called her Astarte, and worshipped her, with her lover Adonis, as the prime movers of life, whose veins and sinews were the fields and vines of men. But to the Greeks Adonis was a mortal, killed by a wild boar in a valley of Lebanon. Astarte, they said, had bargained for his soul against the powers of the underworld, and such was the force of love that he was sent back to her on earth for that part of the year when the streams are full and the fields green.