Smuggler by Richard Stratton

Author:Richard Stratton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

KHALID WAITS FOR us outside the restaurant. Before returning to the villa, I ask him to take me to the temple complex of Bacchus and Jupiter, the fantastic ruins rising up like a dream landscape from the hill in the middle of town. Khalid has no interest in fallen temples, he leaves me to wander alone among the ruins. He stays by the car to watch the gaggle of tourists, mostly Beirutis, some young women with exposed heads who have come to Baalbek in small buses, and who pay to ride the tired, leathery camels tethered in the parking lot.

The war has all but eviscerated Lebanon’s foreign tourist industry. The ruins are empty. I have visited this site on previous trips to Baalbek, perhaps even in other lifetimes. I’m drawn here as if by some unseen force, utterly fascinated by this enigmatic, sacred place and how and why it came to be one of the wonders of the ancient world—an obscure religious center well inland, difficult to get to, and with no political or trading significance. The temples at Baalbek were known as a place of oracular divination, a place where kings and conquerors, mystics and magicians came seeking elucidation of the present and a vision for the future. If it worked for them, perhaps it would work for me.

It is late afternoon, the golden hour. I sit on one of the massive slabs of cut stone and face the setting sun. The light is refracted through the columns. Time stands still. I let my mind go, enter the infinite, let the mystery captured in the stones take me higher even than my beloved al-Kayf—though, truth be told, when you smoke as much as I do you never really come down. There is a fundamental truth cast in these stones, an understanding of the meaning of life I must fathom to free my mind from the petty cares and woes of mere time-captured existence. Who cares about this hash trip? Why am I always obsessing about getting over on the Man? So what if I’m facing a shitload of time back in the States? There is no such thing as time. And who cares if the cops and judges are a bunch of assholes and hypocrites? What’s that got to do with who I am? The government may be in the hands of a gang of conspirators—nothing new there. None of that matters; it is not important. Mere details. There is a secret locked in the giant rose granite columns rising from a foundation of limestone megaliths. Understand the truth fixed forever in the temples and platforms and sculptures harkening back thousands of years before Jesus Christ walked the earth, and this truth was foreseen and will still be here long after I am gone, long after Bernie Wolfshein and DEA, CENTAC, the American government, and these stupid, asinine laws cease to exist and are forgotten, these stones will still be here.

The place is a riddle in stone, compelling and humbling.

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