Word: baalbek
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hours. The ritual has been going on for 32 years, making squat, swarthy Um Kalthoum, now a matron of 64, the most famous personality in the Arab world, better known than Nasser, especially among desert folk. When she appeared for the first time at Lebanon's Baalbek Festival last month, her followers came by the busload from points as distant as the Persian Gulf. Her two concerts in the 4,000-seat tent theater amid the Roman ruins were sold out months in advance, and scalpers got up to $250 for tickets. While she conducted the 20-piece orchestra...
Airfreighted Oysters. Tourists are drawn to a land where ski resorts are only two hours from Mediterranean beaches, and by such antique monuments as Byblos and the massive stone platforms and columns of Roman Baalbek. Hotels are so jammed that the new Phoenicia Hotel, opened in 1962, is already building a 250-room annex. Restaurants serve airfreighted French oysters, Scotch salmon, Danish ham and English beef...
Baal was a sun god, Baalbek his temple in Lebanon, and currently the site of a summer festival where Ballet Stars Margot Fonteyn, 45, and Rudolf Nureyev, 25, were dancing. Betweentimes, they had themselves a ball sunbathing at Beirut's Saint Simon Beach, she in a bikini that was utterly tutu, he in a monokini that was, as they say in London, utterly twee...
...labor paper to give an identity to the thousands of building tradesmen who helped make all this splendor possible. Perhaps these men will someday be forgotten like the faceless helots who built the awesome pyramids of Egypt, the beehive tomb at Mycenae, the Temple of Apollo at Baalbek, the Great Wall of China, those slaves of inscrutable tyrannies who toiled without recompense...
They concluded that the famed "Baalbek verandah" in Lebanon-a vast and ancient platform of huge stone slabs-may have been the launching site for the return trip of cosmonauts from another world. Though discounting the Bible as a source of revealed religion, Writers Rich and Chernenkov eagerly accept it as a historical document. References to angels descending to earth, they decided, may refer to travelers from outer space, "just as some hundreds of years ago the first Spaniards were taken for gods by the Indians." Such Biblical figures as Enoch and Elijah, who "reportedly" ascended to heaven, may have...