Climb

Climb up the stairs,
And you shall see,
My beauty is in each step.

T.

via Flickr http://flic.kr/p/m9eHHu

Stairways to nowhere

When driving around the North mountains of Lebanon, I came through a long street on the side of the qannoubine valley, right after the army checkpoint of Tourza heading towars Seraal.

The road looks normal to the uninterested eye, but if you look closely at the sides of the cliff, you notice old staircases, where nature has once again claimed the space.

But the big question is: where do these staircases lead to?
If you ever decide to get out of your car and climb up these stairs, you’ll notice that they always end abruptly, with no sign of roads or way to follow being present anywhere. No indications whatsoever of there ever being a continuing route for those who used to use these stairs.

So why were they built? For what purpose? I’m not sure, but hey, all we can do is speculate; so here is my reasoning.

1- First choice being the abnormal holocaust type of thing; where spirits climb the stairs to reach the land of the dead (Doesn’t make much sense though does it?).

2- Second choice being a bunch of bored people that decided to build these stairs and left them in nature and time’s mercy, so that one day, people like you and me wonder where they came from and try to understand their purpose (but even that sounds pretty unlikely).

3- The third choice is the most logical one I found, it made sense in many ways, though at the same time this explanation didn’t fit all the staircases found.

When roads were first cut through mountains, donkey and pedestrian roads that used to go through the mountain were cut off. A way that most villagers used was to add stairs and trails so the commoners could still use them, even though a full functioning road was now present.

When following this logic in my mind I went out, and climbed the stairs, trying to find an escape trail that would lead from the end of the stairs into the cliff, in most of them the trail was eaten over by new trees, bushes, and moss. But some didn’t.

And I have to say the first option came drifting back into my mind as soon as I noticed some stairs ending with walls of mountain, untouched, with no sign of previous trail being even hinted by the environment; complete dead end roads; stairways to nowhere.

Having studied the environment over the years, I noticed that no significant land movement was recorded on these cliffs since the roads have been cut-out through them; so where did they used to lead to if there was, since back in the days, no roads or trails leading off the end of the last slab? The walls of the cliff have always been there, untouched, impossible to climb for the most, barely see through to the other side of the hill.

I will leave that to your imagination; after all, mine has been going through different scenarios over many years trying to decipher this mystery. But that’s the best part about it; it will probably always be a mystery.

T.