Further on, looking out over the sea, is one of the most perfectly located theatres I have ever seen, and in excellent condition too. Time seems frozen as I climb on the stage, waves thumping against the rocks a hundred yards behind me, the steep stone tiers rising and curving around in front of me. Test the acoustics with a few lines from Julius Caesar, not long dead when this was built, but am booed off by the crew.
As the road winds up the hill behind Apollonia, it passes a complex of ancient tombs and catacombs extending right across the hillside, most of them fallen into a romantic state of disrepair. Those classical carvings, vaults, decorated lintels and bits of sarcophagi that haven’t already been looted lie around in staggering profusion, visited mainly by flocks of sheep and herds of goats picking away at the scrubby grass that covers them.
The extent of this burial ground gives some idea of the importance of the city of Cyrene, much of which still stands, built into the folds of the hills. Two mighty propylaea, a colonnade and several headless deities with exquisitely sculpted robes adorn the old Greek settlement, erected in the seventh century BC. A cluster of elegant baths and fountains show the preoccupations of the Romans, who grafted their own architecture onto the Greek original. I’m poking around them when I find a goat in the hypocaust. Quite a shock, but a good name for a volume of archaeological memoirs. A Goat in the Hypocaust.
Following the railway tracks laid by the Italians in the 1920s to help them excavate and restore the site I come across the eye-catching Fountain of The Nymph Cyrene. With its carved statue of a young girl gracefully ripping open a lion’s mouth, it’s an ingenious way of telling a story and creating a water outlet at the same time. In Greek mythology, Cyrene so attracted Apollo with her animal wrestling skills that he sent a chariot to pick her up and take her across the water to the fertile highlands of northern Libya, in which green and pleasant land they consummated their relationship and she bore him a son.
The land that Apollo chose for his tryst with Cyrene is known nowadays as Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain, and it is quite an extensive upland area, its scenery not a lot different from Provence or even at times, where the roads narrow and the limestone walls crowd in, from Dorset. Annual rainfall up here is about the same as London’s and wide and fertile cornfields stretch away on either side of the road. It was grain that brought the Romans to Africa, and vast quantities were shipped across the Mediterranean, earning Libya the title of ‘the breadbasket of Rome’.
Cyrene was continuously occupied for over 1200 years, until the Arab invaders of the seventh century, not much interested in classical cities, let it fall back gradually into oblivion.
The Italians returned to the province of Cyrenaica in the 1920s but met spirited resistance to their colonising from a local leader called Umar al-Mukhtar. In 1930 General Graziani was sent out from Rome to deal with the opposition. Al-Mukhtar was captured and hanged, and those who resisted Graziani’s policies were rounded up into concentration camps.
So hated did the Italians make themselves in this short period that there is now almost no indication they were ever here on the Green Mountain. Al-Mukhtar, on the other hand, is still remembered as a hero and received the ultimate accolade of being portrayed on screen by Anthony Quinn.
As we descend from the plateau towards Benghazi, the olive groves, junipers and stands of cypress and Aleppo pine grow fewer and the number of roadblocks increases.
Like Tobruk, Benghazi is a city of infrastructure, girdled by a network of underpasses, ring roads and flyovers, all largely free of traffic, and as the road signs are only in Arabic it’s impossible to tell where they’re going. The woods and fields of Jebel Akhdar seem like a dream as we cruise slowly through a bare and featureless cityscape, coming eventually to rest before the concrete and glass terraces of the Hotel Tibesti. I would have said at the doors of the Hotel Tibesti, or even at the portals of the Hotel Tibesti, but the architects of this magnificent late 1970s pile miscalculated the height of the concrete roof above the entrance and all tourist buses have to park and unload in a nearby road, making it a good walk to the hotel lobby through a taxi rank, a small garden, past ornamental fountains and up a substantial flight of steps.
Day Eighty-Two
BENGHAZI
In the lobby of the Hotel Tibesti hang neat placards with quotes from Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book. To us sophisticated Westerners, for whom talking about political theory is about as uncomfortable as talking about piles, it seems pretty odd to have ‘Committees Everywhere’ hanging up in a place of hospitality and entertainment, not to mention the even less catchy ‘The Social i.e. National Factor is the Driving Force Of Human History’. But that’s how it is here in the Jamahiriya, the ‘state of the masses’, where Muammar Gaddafi has run the show for the last thirty-one years. After he and fellow army officers got rid of a monarchy backed by America and Britain, Gaddafi made sweeping changes. Private enterprise was banned, foreign influence discouraged and the country reorganised around people’s committees and congresses. Alcohol was banned.
Bankrolling the revolution was not a problem, Libya being in the enviable position of having the world’s third largest oil earnings and a population less than that of Greater London.
Gaddafi’s survival owes much to his ability to reinvent himself. He’s been at various times scourge of the West and leader of the Arab world; currently he is the great Pan-African. The change can be charted on the billboards.
It’s not quite the old communist-style cult of personality, but there is a lot of him about. The standard image is full face, aviator shades, pillbox-style chechia perched on thick black curly hair, skin creased by deep, but reassuring, Jagger-style grooves. None of the Soviet-style hard man here. He looks every inch the entertainer (and is almost the same age as Mick). On one rapidly fading billboard I saw, above the words ‘American aggression’, Gaddafi, fist raised, defying the bolts and arrows of missile attack (fifteen years ago his adopted daughter was killed in the American air attacks on Benghazi and Tripoli). Around this centrepiece were depictions of the caring Colonel, visiting children in schools and hospitals. On more recent posters he’s likely to be seen emerging from a map of Africa, shedding a halo of golden rays across the continent. The parallel that comes irresistibly to mind is with Cecil Rhodes and his dream of spreading the red of the British Empire from Cape to Cairo.
The redirection of Gaddafi’s foreign policy towards Saharan Africa should not perhaps be a surprise. He has always identified with the nomads and still prefers to live in a tent rather than a palace. There are few leaders these days who care much about the Sahara and I would very much have liked to have met and talked to him about his policy.
So far our advances have met with no success. The Libyan authorities remain deeply mistrustful of Western media and today we have to content ourselves with another closely guided tour.
Abdul and Mohammed collect me in their car. Abdul is our chief minder from the Government Media Department, while Mohammed, slimmer, younger and already a father of five, is an air-traffic controller in Benghazi. This, apparently, is not a full-time job; he’s also a plumber and a painter.