The Cedar of God

On the heights above the Qadisha Valley, at an elevation where the air carries a cold it does not release until June, there are thirty-six cedars that may be over a thousand years old. The grove is called Arz el-Rab — the Cedars of God — and it sits within one of the last stands of Cedrus libani that once blanketed Lebanon's mountains from Batroun to the Bekaa.

The cedars were the great export of the ancient Levant. Egyptian papyri from the twelfth century BCE document shipments of Lebanese cedar to the Delta — for boat-building, for temple doors, for the coffers of pharaohs. The Epic of Gilgamesh names the cedar forest as the domain of the god Humbaba. Solomon's Temple was roofed with Lebanese cedar, brought down from the mountains to the port at Byblos and carried south by Phoenician crews.

The trees you see today at Arz el-Rab are not the trees that were felled. They are the survivors — the unreachable, the forgotten, the sacred. For centuries the grove was protected by the church of Mar Elisha below it, and by a tacit agreement among the surrounding villages that the cedars were not to be touched. No written law protected them until 1876. By then, most of the range had already been cleared.

The Shouf Biosphere Reserve, established in 1996, now protects 550 square kilometres of the central range. It is home to more than two hundred cedar groves at various stages of regeneration — some planted in the 1960s as part of a national reforestation effort, others naturally seeded from old-growth ancestors. Walking among the young trees, you can see how the species grows: slowly, patiently, adding a ring each year.

Collectors of Lebanese antiquities who deal in wooden objects — furniture from the Ottoman period, carved church iconostases, old panel paintings on cedar support — know the cedar by its smell. Break the seal of an old chest and the resin still speaks. It is one of the most durable woods on earth, resistant to insects and moisture, capable of holding a carved surface for centuries. To handle an object made from Lebanese cedar is to touch a material that was prized before the alphabet was invented.