DESTRUCTION has its fascination. Revenues from ruins bolster the economies of scores of countries - Egypt, Cambodia, Peru, Syria, Greece, Indonesia, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Mexico and Italy among them.
The fascination may be morbid but at least it has always had the virtue of being somewhat scholarly. We move about stone columns and carved panels, clutching guide books, contemplating the art of the ancients, making known our appreciation in tones of hushed awe.
In Beirut, there's no need to pretend. You stand in the middle of a giant swathe of cleared land, where some 350 recently demolished buildings once stood, gaze around at the blown-apart shells of once-grand hotels like the St George, Holiday Inn Phonecia and the Hilton, and you issue an expletive or three. All that is left of the famed Martyrs' Square is the bronzed statue that once graced innumerable postcards and tourism posters.
Bullet holes and mortar shell pockmarks are the motif of the city, an indelible tattoo as vivid as the markings on a Pacific tribal elder's face. You can almost take them for granted until you venture out along the Green Line and realise just what awful havoc artillery can wreak. Until 1991, the heavily fortified divide between the Christian East and Muslim West of Beirut, it is now a long and unyielding mosaic of misery.
The patterns of destruction are bizarre, almost surreal. There are buildings with entire sides missing, floors collapsed upon other floors, their very existence a gravity-defying exercise. There are patches of respite too, like Riad Solh Street, which escaped bombing for the same reason that Switzerland's neutrality was observed by Allies and Axis powers alike during World War II - it housed the banks.
This is no dark ages, middles ages, dawn of time stuff. It happened on our televisions over the past twenty years. For a brief moment in the first half of 1996, it was happening again. It's too new to be proper history, too unstable to interest the pipe-smoking professors. It's probably the most honestly exciting city on earth at the moment, with echoes of Berlin or Vienna after the trouncing of Hitler. In fact, the aura of Graham Greene's The Third Man is so cogent that it would not be a surprise to see a young Orson Welles slip out of a darkened doorway. I did find myself casting the horizon for ferris wheels from time to time.