The hills of Adonis Book

The peculiar appeal of Colin Thubron is that from the beginning he opens a magic door the invitation to which is impossible to resist. Here's the very first paragraph to this book, perhaps the most beguiling of all, written in 1967 when he was twenty-seven and republished in this edition forty years later ... "Of all the gods conceived by ancient men, the last to pass away were those divinities of sun and earth. Because they represented most clearly the needs and instincts of mankind, they remained behind long after their images had been broken. 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, along 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 in 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 earth green. In time this goddess lost touch with her origins and the cosmic energy drained from the myths. But in this beautiful and diversified land, with its mosaic of truculent and conservative races, her memory was retained in numberless sites and legends, and still abound along the traveller's way as a haunting leitmotiv which returns again and again. So to travel in this land is not only to discover those hardy divinities in their in their many permutations, but to encounter the ancient dream of resurrection which they embodied."

For such a young man the combination of erudition, scholarship and a sumptuous prose style promoted by physical fearlessness is not only remarkable but almost unique. In a new introductory preface he adds, with the good sense or good taste or merely lack of interest never so much as to mention politics or those who manipulate that dirty business except to mourn the irretrievable damage they cause, that his intention was "to recapture the beauty of a ravaged country and those people who used to live there in peace." Thubron, a true poet of history, has the rare ability to be able to live in the present, as we all have to, while remaining immersed not in the more recent past but in an unknown past, with intuited awareness decipherable only through myths and legends lost in time which however much 'rationalists' wish to denigrate continue, increasingly dimly, to provide the sole guide to knowledge.

Lebanon was the home of the long-disappeared Phoenicians, who from the harbour of Tyre sailed the Mediterranean to Greece and Egypt and passed beyond the pillars of Hercules to the Iberian and Celtic coasts in search of metals, putting it about to evade competition that these boundaries marked the end of the world so that for centuries after no other mariners dared pass them for fear of falling off. Mostly on foot and through the passing seasons the author traversed the full length of this small but wild and mountainous country, finding in its hidden valleys living memories and monuments of shrines dedicated to almost every known deity of the ancient world as descendants of Astarte and Adonis - Osiris, Aphrodite, Apollo, Venus, Mithra and even possibly the gods of India who originated in Persia, ending up, rather dolefully and to other religions disgustingly, as the essentially sado-masochistic idols of Christianity, a tortured naked male figure nailed to a cross and a sentimentally tearful but 'pure' simpering woman wreathed in fluttering sky-blue drapery. Islam, like Plato, got it right in one way: figurative art is a seductive lie often barely distinguishable from pornography. But Christianity and Islam lay only skin deep. The Byzantine chapels and the mosques, many still then in use, ignored orthodoxy and practiced their own obscure and still half-pagan salvatory rituals; even the Crusaders forget the reason they were there and left their genealogical mark in the form of Northern blue eyes and blond hair intermingling strangely with Semitic darkness. Many mountain villages knew nothing of the next only a few miles away. That was all soon to end. "Father Gregoire's Mass was the most simple. He felt that the surroundings were wrong. The room was plain and small, lined with portraits of bishops and archimandrites bearded like gods, and a photograph of the President of Lebanon. The service proceeded in a nasal Arabic. Shorn of its doorways and pillared distances, the great rite palled, like a pageant in plain clothes. The priests mumbled cabbalisticly and the congregation was silent. 'Our people do not always worship well', said the father. 'They are rather like Italians, always asking god to give them something. It is profane.' .... I had noticed this too. Young Arabs, practical and quick with solutions, are beginning to say that God is a fraud. 'But what of our brains?', cried the father. 'We may buy or sell with them, but we cannot use them to judge the universe. Science may apply to one sphere, but it could not penetrate all, for it was a product of men's minds, bound for ever to the human delusion.....' So we walked across the river of faith; hands which touch but do not hold."

In a small village in the Northern hinterland, the Arab-Israeli War broke out again, the villagers were frightened and suspicious and Thubron hastily went by car to Tripoli, where foreigners were being evacuated. Scorning all that because he hadn't yet reached his ultimate goal, he made his own way down the coast to what was once Bylbos, where Osiris was said to have been buried. "I slid into the sea at night and swam. Near the harbour the Crusader world was heavy and soft behind: the church and the blunt castle, religion and war. The moon was shining. The waves flowed in my fingers like liquid gold, and drunken fish went spangled over rocks. To the north I saw the darkness where the river of Adonis meets the sea." It was a two-day walk to its source at Aphaca, the destination of countless pilgrims of every faith for countless generations where in the Spring the valley was green and covered with blood-red anemones, the stream bursting from a cavern and splashing its sacrament against the rocks. "The way ends. The Scarlet River flows from galleries of darkness, turned one upon the other, and the pilgrim can follow the goddess no further. She withdraws behind the senselessness of the dark. But the ancients saw this as a sign: life out of stone. Nothing ends but sinks underground, awaiting its time ..... Because time is corruptible, the past may come again, and the figures of love return. And although the pilgrims leave the cavern by the way they entered, they see Adonis rising with the Spring breeze of flutes and cymbals, and feel the frailness of their feet on the shell of the earth."

A book to be lingered over for its sheer loveliness, tender innocence untouched by treacherous idealism. Colin Thubron by now is approaching his eightieth year, his days of solitary adventuring are over, as reading between the lines he makes clear in his last book, 'To a Mountain in Tibet', knitting together all the strands in a way that could almost be called 'mystical'. There's nothing tragic about that for man naturally reserved and modest except in so far as that we all have to promote ourselves to some extent or other to go on living to the full. What is more tragic - though perhaps I'm speaking for myself, he may be more happily detached by inherent temperament, time, and having known at first hand the ruins and repercussions of so many lost Empires - is to have to see a world that not so long ago was still beautiful being eradicated and despoiled by humanity that mostly cares about nothing. The River of Adonis still flows, though now through a majestic landscape littered with the rubbish of or for unseeing tourists who are there not from piety or wonderment but because others of their kind are, and Thubron's Lebanon no longer exists.