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hotels and businesses which in turn replenish Lebanon’s depleted financial resources. In one sense, therefore, an end to Lebanese conflict would bring almost as many financial problems as it would solve. Yet as long as hostilities continue, so Lebanon’s economy is going to decline.
     
    I read this article and reread it. I got a contrasting insight into the country I was travelling to from the one that my friends Mike and Shelagh had given me, though their memory was a much older one, of the place long before the civil war began in 1976. But I found it funny in its own way. Here I was entering a kind of Rambo-land, an Arabic John Wayne country where everybody was toting a gun and everybody was part of some paramilitary machine. So was I really travelling from the frying pan into the fire, from one kind of political and social turmoil to another? I suppose I was, but it didn’t worry me too much.
    I keep the article and still reread it, and still find the humour in it, particularly that passage where Fisk talks about ‘… four scruffy youths in combat jackets holding AK47 rifles’. I felt old bells ringing, echoing out of the place I had just come from, where local militias had become the defenders of a half-understood political aspiration and had taken upon themselves a brief not drawn up by the people they claimed to defend.
     
    They say that an aircraft arriving in Beirut has to make a careful approach and a difficult landing. The nearness of the city to the airport and the proximity of the sea and hills add immeasurably to the pilot’s difficulty; no-one lands by computer card in Beirut. Entering at dusk I couldn’t see the landscape below me. Only the jostle of the Lebanese emigrants we had picked up in Frankfurt indicated that ourjourney’s end was at hand. The fume of cigar smoke and the reek of whiskey began to disappear as the travellers made ready their baggage and said goodbye to their workmates.
    The darkness as I emerged from the aircraft seemed to intensify the night heat. A short walk took me to the airport proper. It was small and decrepit, far removed from what I had left in Heathrow. But it was packed with people. Strangely there were no women. The night, the heat and the strangeness of the place gave it an eerie quality. I felt myself, along with two other Irish teachers who had been on the flight being watched, stared at. It was disconcerting, I felt very much at sea. I was an alien here and I felt it from the moment of my arrival. It was difficult to distinguish simple curiosity from mindless animosity or worse still a kind of festering hatred that seemed to lurk behind some of the faces.
    A small, fat man shambled quickly forward, holding up a piece of paper with my name and the letters A.U.B. written alongside. I hurriedly moved to shake his hand, hoping that some confident human contact with him might dispel the oppressive atmosphere.
    Beside him, grining from ear to ear, stood a burly sergeant of police.
    They were an odd couple. The thought of a comic double act crossed my mind and perhaps made my greeting more honest and relaxed.
    The policeman’s exuberant handshake, complete with hand at his heart contrasted with the smaller man’s obvious anxiety about getting us quickly through the customs and the tedious bureaucracy of officialdom. A surly customs man asked me if I was English without bothering to look at my passport. I answered, pointing at the passport ‘No, Irish’. He was puzzled for a moment, brightened and embraced me warmly: ‘You are welcome to Lebanon,’ he said with some enthusiasm. I felt myself becoming less apprehensive, though still anxious to be gone.
    As we crossed the car park with this strange twosome I noted that we were being accompanied by ten or twelve men in full uniform, all of them armed. The whole airport was stiff with them, sitting or standing on the tops of cars. Each of them had a gun and they watched
    our amoeba-like movement, encumbered with