The Adventures of Will

Haidar and I have spent the last two days up in Saqi at the old old house excavating the stable/dungeon level while Mimi and Will stayed home and practiced walking just holding onto one hand.  Don’t know who worked harder…if this is your first viewing, be sure and check out older posts for more pics of the old house.  First post for this trip was June 5.

To give a bit of reference, the old house is built around and on top of a limestone promontory with views down the valley towards the sea (visible on a clear day).  The ground level of the house is approximately 500 years old and is made up of a series of arched rooms forming an “L”.  Most of the “L” had been closed off over time with the long part serving primarily as a stable and the short part serving as a dungeon when Haidar’s family served as the local authority under the Ottoman Turks (this even lasted through several peasant revolts until the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI).  The exterior walls of this portion contain only four doors, three very small windows and numerous gun slits.

Our mission was to remove the majority of the interior walls to get back to the original structure (and then find the buried gold of course).  We found a crate that was, alas, empty plus a rat’s nest full of walnuts, several well-preserved shoes and some really cool rocks with holes in them that were used to tether horses.  We made great strides on day one then hit a few snags early on day two.  We wished for a rock guy, a good rock guy, an old rock guy.  One of the Egyptian farm workers hopped on his ATV and returned half an hour later with the promise of a rock guy at 3:30.  We took lunch/cigarette/book breaks until promptly at 3:30 (very unLebanese) the rock guy (pith helmet, coke bottle glasses, canvas shoes and a rope belt) appeared in a 1970s white Volvo and pronounced some things removeable and some things not.  And so ended excavation day two.