Read Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" for Free Online

reservist, you
know, and this is my vacation, too."
    The Israelis wouldn't, however, allow my car through. I told
Akbar to meet me there in two days and then hiked across noman's-land to a line of taxis on the other side.
    There were three stages in crossing the Israeli lines. Once
through the checkpoint at Bater, I had to go by taxi to an interrogation center a few miles up the road. From the interrogation center I
took a bus eight or ten miles to another checkpoint in Jezzine.
    At the interrogation stop I was searched and questioned by
Shin Bet, the Israeli F.B.I. An enlisted man apologized for the inconvenience. Less auspicious-looking travelers were being led
off to be grilled in windowless huts.

    In Jezzine I was questioned again by the South Lebanon Army,
an interesting process since we had no language in common.
    I hired another taxi to take me the fifteen miles from Jezzine to
Sidon. It took five hours to get through the Bater-Jezzine crossing
and a total of eight hours to make it from Beirut to Sidon. Before
the war it was an hour drive on the coast road.
    Sidon and Tyre, the two coastal cities of southern Lebanon,
were once the principal towns of ancient Phoenicia and spawned a
mercantile empire from Turkey to Spain. Important archaeological
work has been done in both places, exposing six millennia of
human misbehavior. Lebanon has been overrun in turn by Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks,
Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Arabs again, Turks, French, more
Arabs, Israelis and occasional U. S. Marines. Perhaps by means of
the past one can begin to comprehend the present. Or learn which
way to run from the future.
    I hired a Palestinian Christian driver named Simon and had
him take me twenty-five miles down the lush coast littoral to Tyre.
We passed through ten or a dozen Israeli guard posts. These are
heaps of sandbags with anxious eyes and many gun barrels sticking
over the top. They look down upon a series of "Khomeini gates,"
cement barriers that jut into the road like meshing-gear teeth and
force vehicles to zig-zag slowly between them in single file. If you
stall in the middle of these, you die.
    The roadsides all over Lebanon are piled with trash, the coast
road especially so. Beaches and parks are even worse. There's
something about a civil war that brings out the litterbug in people.
    Tyre is an awful mess of dirty modern architecture, offal and
the detritus of battle. The Elissa Beach Club hotel, on the south
shore of the Tyre peninsula, may be one of the few oceanside hotels
anyplace where none of the rooms face the sea. But it's clean, the
hot water is not actually cold and the food's passable. Also, there's
nowhere else to stay.
    Simon went home for the night, and I was left on the hotel's
roof terrace about a thousand miles from the nearest example of the
Four Freedoms. "I have a cousin in Cincinnati" was the only English anyone could speak. I watched the sun go down behind the
ruins of some previous attempt to bring the rule of law to these
climes.

    I'd hoped at least for a good night's sleep. There'd been quite
a few bombs going off in Beirut. I'd heard five the night before,
starting with one at midnight in a bar a few blocks from the
Commodore and winding up with a spectacular attempt on the life
of the minister of education at six A. M. This took windows out for
three blocks around and shook the furniture in my room. The
minister survived but my repose did not. But this night, it turned
out, was the beginning of the Hajj, the Moslem holiday marking the
return of the Mecca pilgrims, and the urchins next door celebrated
with a six-hour firecracker fight in the street. Then at two A. M.
there was a truly horrendous explosion.
    No use looking around the next day to see what's been
blasted. Everything has been already.
    Later I read in the Beirut newspapers that while I was in the
south there were four sniping attacks on Israeli