An American friend called me once we arrived back in town. A group of resourceful expatriates had gathered up enough groceries and liquor for an "end of the world" dinner before the next day's funeral, where anything seemed likely to happen. I contributed a fifth of bourbon, and we all crowded around the dinner table, exchanging our best guesses late into the night as to what might happen next. We laughed at one another's gallows humor and the sad state of affairs in tiny, hapless Lebanon. Halfway through, however, one of our Lebanese friends excused herself, and I quickly realized how callous we had been. For us, as Westerners, everything that happened in Lebanon took place in the third person. For us, a trip out of the country was just a passport away. For her, however, this was the only country she had -- and she was smart enough to know in what awful direction it appeared to be heading.

Wednesday morning, as the crowds began to gather around Hariri's mansion in Qoreitem for the funeral procession into downtown, I ran into my same group of friends standing by a busy intersection not two blocks from my apartment. The Lebanese friend I was worried we had offended had copies of all the day's newspapers in her hand, and I asked to see them. On the front page of one, I saw a remarkable photograph that filled me with both a sense of hope for the country and at the same time fear.

Hariri's two sons, Sunni Muslims, stood together in the photograph side by side with the Druze chieftain, Walid Jumblatt, and the Maronite Christian patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir. They were all receiving mourners, together, inside the Hariri residence.

To someone with little background knowledge of Lebanon and the Middle East, such a photograph would seem unremarkable. But for anyone with even a passing understanding of the sectarian conflict that engulfed Lebanon from 1975 until 1990, the image of the four men standing united under the headline "Hariris Snub Government Overtures" was nothing short of amazing. For now, the leaders of once bitter rivals have put aside their differences in united contempt toward the current regime, widely dismissed as puppets of the Syrian government.

And as one of the keenest longtime observers of the Middle East, David Hirst, noted in the Guardian, Syria "is on the defensive. So are its Lebanese allies, inside and outside the regime."

For that reason a friend of mine felt the attack on Hariri was a "message" -- meant to remind those calling for Lebanese independence to remember who really remains in charge of the country.

The day of the funeral, however, belonged to Hariri and the opposition. Tara and I followed the procession for a while through the crowded, crazy Beirut streets until we had had enough and took a shortcut to the unfinished mosque that was being built by Hariri downtown, where the funeral was to be held. Already, tens of thousands of people had gathered, and we worked our way down to the VIP seating section just in time to snap pictures of the American ambassador arriving.

I chatted with one of the men on his security detail for a while and asked him if he had ever seen such a mess as far as security was concerned. The crowd had by now grown to hundreds of thousands, and I kept one arm around Tara to keep her from getting swept away in the flood of shouting, chanting men and women. The Boy Scouts of Lebanon, of all people, kept a semblance of order, linking their arms to hold back the crowd. I tried to imagine the Boy Scouts doing the same thing in America, out there in their uniforms with their merit badges, and the ambassador's security man and I chuckled as -- against all odds -- the scouts managed to keep people from killing one another outside the mosque.

Tara and I traded her camera back and forth, me holding it high above my head in an effort to get some pictures of the wild crowd as they pushed against one another for space.

The two of us then spent 15 minutes fighting our way through the crowd to get another angle, and we saw several people being led away on stretchers by the Red Cross, most of them casualties of the heat. Once again, the Boy Scouts, together with the Red Cross and a phalanx of Druze clerics, managed to keep some sort of order outside the mosque. We narrowly avoiding being trampled as bearers started unloading the coffins carrying Hariri's security detail killed in the blast.

We then crept around the corner, where we saw a group of boys climbing over the walls of the unfinished mosque. We followed them in and then followed a smaller group of people to the roof of the mosque, where we looked down on the crowd as the service came to a close.

Forty feet below, in the street, one of the valiant scouts was bleeding from the head as the result of some unseen blow. He would be OK, though, and as his mates helped him to the Red Cross station, I watched his fellow scouts attempt to put his bloody blue beret back on his head as he limped away. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The whole scene was just so awful and beautiful and confusing and hopeful.

And that, I realized, is the city of Beirut and the country of Lebanon in a nutshell. Now perhaps more than ever. In a time of mourning and fear, there is also a sense that this horrible tragedy really might change things for the better, that somehow this will force the last cards left in Syria's hand, that although the death of a man as financially powerful as Rafik Hariri might mean the start of a long night for Lebanon's economy, it might also signal the start of something else, perhaps even the long-awaited independence of the Lebanese people.

The majority of the predictions, of course, have been far more negative. Most prognosticators never even bothered to imagine a Lebanon without Hariri because it was just too awful to comprehend. Most people fear Lebanon is about to slip back into the abyss of open warfare. But in a country that has already survived 15 year of brutal civil war, the greatest natural resource left in Lebanon is hope. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough this time.

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