Arabesque
“The track, which zigzagged up for a thousand feet, through scrub and dwarf oaks, from the bottom of a gorge, led to the village and nowhere else. Beit Chabab lay along the crest of a ridge that pointed seawards from the watershed bluff on which stood the white church and squat tower of the Maronites. At the eastern end of the ridge was a Greek Orthodox monastery, its two domes just showing above powerful walls. Wall of Catholic and wall of Greek were joined together by a line of low cliffs, overhung by the rough, wooded balconies of houses. To the traveller gazing upwards from the gorge, so much rock and masonry gave the impression of a medieval town compactly built for defence.
Beit Chabab, however, was anything but compact—a tribute to the peace of the mountains under French rule. On the top of the ridge, among scattered pines, tiny single-storied stone villas were set wherever a pocket of soil among the rocks lent itself to the creation of orchard and vineyard.
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