The family’s mansions turn out to be not so grand

Given Khadafy’s noted flamboyance, the residences of the House of Khadafy were not quite as grand as people might have supposed.

They lacked the faux grandeur of Saddam Hussein’s marbled palaces. There are no columns that bear Khadafy’s initials, or fists cast in replica of his hands, or river-fed moats with voracious carp.

But in Baghdad and Tripoli, what remained still projected the distance between power and powerlessness.

As rebels and residents started to pick through the detritus of the Khadafys’ lives, there was a sense of laying claim to a country commandeered by the Arab world’s longest-ruling leader - and speaking their minds about the country they have inherited.

“For somebody who’s very rich, he was very cheap,’’ said Fuad Gritli, as he drove through a sprawling parcel near the airport known as the Farm, where Khadafy lived.

There was also a sense of something incomplete. Even as people picked through the Khadafys’ belongings, the colonel and his children remained at large.

In the sanctum of the Farm, there are rolling, irrigated fields. Camels wandered unattended. Still standing was a tent where he met foreign dignitaries, its canvas decorated in pictures of camels and palm trees. NATO bombing had destroyed an unfinished Moroccan-style house, more tents built with more expensive fabric, and a knot of bunker-style concrete buildings for official use.

As Gritli and a friend drove through roads that seemed to lead nowhere, they shook their heads. Rebels rolled through a compound still not secure. So did looters.

“We weren’t allowed to get anywhere near, not even the gate,’’ Gritli said.