I got onto a bus towards Beirut but later got him to drop me off at Nahr El Kalb, or Dog River. Here, over 3000 years, conquerors and armies passing through Lebanon would leave inscriptions and stele on the rockface at the canyon near the mouth of Nahr El Kalb. Among them were: Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, the one whose forces which according to the Bible, hurried after Moses into the parting Red Sea; Several Assyrian kings from what is today northern Iraq; Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II, who was mentioned in the Bible as the destructor of the Temple in Jerusalem and the builder of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the Ancient World; a Roman emperor; a Byzantine governor; a Mamluke Sultan; French Emperor Napoleon III¡¯s expedition and other French armies; various British military expeditions and lastly the Lebanese Republic on the evacuation of foreign military forces from Lebanon in 1946, which to the Lebanese marked the independence of the country, which sadly, remains unfulfilled in this country whose recent history, too, has long been marked by repeated foreign intervention even after independence.
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