MIDDLE EAST: Thousands have made their escape from Lebanon by sea, writes Michael Jansen
The stately French warship Siroco slips silently into Beirut's empty port flanked by her escort, the anti-submarine frigate Montcalm. Lorries slide alongside the Siroco and forklifts begin to unload pallets of paper nappies, medications and other essentials for war-devastated Lebanon.
Two tents are set up on the quay to process the papers of 250 "repatriates" making the overnight passage to Cyprus and taking a flight to Paris. A third tent, stretchers inside, is for medical cases. Siroco has carried 2,200 to 2,400 French and foreign citizens to Cyprus and 1,000 pallets of supplies to Beirut since July 16th.
Buses arrive, one by one, documents are examined, luggage is stowed, and passengers board in a steady stream. Soldiers and sailors carry infants in arms up steep iron stairs, parents following. Elderly folk and youngsters hurry across the wide helicopter deck to the maintenance hangar, where mattresses and chairs await.
Some are leaving because they have no faith in the ceasefire, others were on holiday and are going home; students are returning to their studies, businessmen to their jobs. A man is going for an operation, a woman wants a "change of scene". Whether their reasons for leaving are good or frivolous, all Siroco's passengers are treated courteously.
Rabiya Jabr, a teacher of electrical engineering at Notre Dame College, plans to spend a week at a hotel in Larnaca. Ayad Khalifeh, from Byblos, where the alphabet was born, is going to Marseilles to collect his mother and bring her back to Beirut.
Maryann Ibrahim, a pretty Shia woman from the flattened town of Bint Jbeil in the south, is going to Paris to search for her mother, divorced by her father when Maryann was an infant. They needed a translator on the only occasion they spoke on the phone in 27 years because Maryann speaks only Arabic and her mother only French.
Architect Yasmin Mashnouk, who was two in 1982 when Israel last invaded Lebanon, almost dropped out of a two-year course at Parsons School of Design in New York city, but changed her mind on the eve of departure. She was visiting friends living near the World Trade Center when it was brought down on September 11th, 2001.
First Montcalm, then Siroco are pushed and pulled by tugs into the open sea.
Beirut shimmers white on the shore, whole and inviting as if the war had never happened.
Few tears are shed: most people will return soon. As the sinking crimson sun bleeds into the sea, the "repatriates" are served a hot meal.
Cmdt Olivier Coupry's dinner table is laid with starched white cloth, silver and china. The ship's senior officers - sailors, doctors and one commando - gather round without ceremony for a meal of moussaka and fruit pie. The conversation focuses on the cost of this war. Washington is promising to rebuild Lebanese homes, roads and bridges destroyed by bombs the US gave Israel. It would have been better to avoid the war or cut it short.
The ship's chaplain performs communion Mass before the evacuees take to their mattresses on the deck beneath the stars to a lullaby sung by Siroco's engines.
During the 58 nautical miles to the "gate" Israel has left for passage in its blockade of the entire Lebanese coast, Siroco and Montcalm are armed and ready to respond if attacked. For the remaining 42-nautical mile journey, crews stand down.
The sky is overcast at dawn, the deck is puddled with humidity, blankets are sodden. Breakfast is a roll and coffee or juice.
Siroco drops anchor far from shore. Disembarkation takes place by landing craft. Attentive sailors and soldiers give a hand to civilians jumping the gap from craft to quay. This is likely to be Siroco's last night passage: Beirut's airport opened yesterday.