The Pillars of Hercules

15 The 7:20 Express to Latakia

There was undoubtedly a more hallucinogenic experience available in poppy-growing Turkey than a long bus ride through Central Anatolia, though it was hard for me to imagine what this might be after a twenty-three-hour trip in the sulfurous interior of a bus of chain-smoking Turks, as day became twilight, turned to night, the moon passing from one side of the bus to the other, gleaming briefly in the snow of the Galatia highlands, fog settling and dispersing like phantasms, glimpses of dervishes, day dawning again, another stop, more yogurt, children crying in the backseats, full daylight in Iskenderun, rain in Antioch, all windows shut, the stale smoke condensing in brown bitter slime on the closed windows as fresh blue fumes rose from forty-nine burning cigarettes in this sleepless acid trip on the slipstream of secondhand smoke.

Being Turks, the smokers were courteous. I was repeatedly offered a cigarette. Yes, plenty for you — please take two!

On a train I would have been scribbling. That is impossible on a bus, which is only good for reading. I was jammed in a seat, with a pain in my lower back that crept to my shoulder blades as we bumped from Ankara to Adana. I retreated into books. I reread the whole of Hindoo Holiday. I read Maugham’s short novel, Up at the Villa. I read Myles Away from Dublin, by Flann O’Brien. I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

In the blue haze of cigarette smoke I reflected on how I had been warned not to take this long route through Turkey.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I asked.

“That the bus will be stopped by Kurds and you’ll be dragged out and held hostage,” said my knowledgeable friend.

That happened frequently in southeastern Turkey, near enough to my route for me to be alarmed. Also, I was headed for Syria, a country very friendly towards the embattled Kurdish people.

“Gechmis olsen. May it be behind you.”

But it had seemed a matter of urgency that I leave. Istanbul was also having its problems. In the previous few days in the Istanbul suburb of Gaziosmanpasha there had been a riot between Muslim fundamentalists and the somewhat schismatic and more liberal-minded Alevi sect. The matter had started with a drive-by shooting — fundamentalists plinking at Alevis at a cafe. Two Alevis dead. Then rival mobs gathered. Twenty-one people had been killed and many more wounded, mostly by the police and commandos who had intervened. Encircling the rioting mobs, the police began firing at each other, like Keystone Kops using live ammo.

The funerals that followed were massive parades of screeching mourners, and hundreds and police and soldiers. At the same time more riots broke out on the Asian side of the Bosporus, at Umranye. That resulted in eight dead, twenty-five wounded and “400 listed as missing”—so the local newspaper said. There was more rioting in Ankara: more funerals, much more disorder. Buses and ferries, bearing furious or sullen passengers, heading from the Asian side were halted and turned back. In other parts of Istanbul there was fighting between fundamentalists and Alevis.

“A foreign power is behind this,” said Mrs. Çiller, the Turkish prime minister. She meant Iran, but Greece was also blamed for “withholding information.”

“What next?” I asked my Turkish friends.

“After Friday prayers tomorrow there’s supposed to be trouble, when people come out of the mosques.”

I said, “Then I think I will leave on Friday, before prayers.”

The ticket from Istanbul to the Syrian border was $25. It seemed a bargain until the bus filled with smoke. And because the weather was cold, the windows stayed shut.

“Ten years ago this was all open fields,” a Turk on the bus named Rashid said to me.

It was all high-rise housing now, and no trees, and in the bare stony fields tent camps had been put up by Gypsies — the tents made of blue plastic sheeting — and these urban poor, with their ponies and dogs, fought for space with the Turks in the tenements.

These were the Alevi neighborhoods. Rashid was a believer. Among his beliefs was metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. Rashid as a good Alawite might be reborn as a star in the Milky Way. A bad Alawite might end up back on earth as a Christian or a Jew. He worshiped sun and fire — a legacy of Zoroastrianism. Orthodox Islam was based on five pillars — prayers, the Hajj, the Ramadan fast, charity and the confession of faith. Rashid rejected these. It was only later, in Syria, that I was told that one of the more peculiar Alawite beliefs is that women do not possess souls. It seemed just as peculiar to me that Alawites believed that men, and especially Alawite men, had souls.

Altogether it was not surprising, perhaps, that the fundamentalists, who had contrived to follow an equally bizarre but different set of beliefs and symbols, had declared war on them.

Speaking of symbols, the bus passed a market where a man was selling cucumbers. The cucumber is a potent symbol in Turkey. Hiyar—cucumber — is a synonym for penis. One of my Turkish friends had said to me, “No one uses the word cucumber in Turkish, because of the vulgar associations.” It was a bit like an English speaker being very careful to give a context when using the loaded word “balls.” But in Turkish a whole set of euphemisms was substituted for cucumber. Most people called them “salad things” (salatalik) so as not to offend polite taste.

Every so often there is a bomb scare in Turkey, sometimes involving the American Embassy. A telephone threat is made, a location is described. A man describing himself as a bomber hangs up. Then the counterterrorists go into action. Sophisticated thermal imaging equipment is brought to bear on an ominous-looking parcel left in a doorway. As many as a hundred men might have surrounded the parcel, to provide cover for those disarming it. In many instances the bomb-disposal experts find a large ripe cucumber in the parcel, with a note saying, This is what you are!

A television set at the front of the bus began showing a violent video of a sub-Rambo sort, all explosions, gunfire, and mutilation. I read Hindoo Holiday. I gagged on the cigarette smoke. The smoke gave me a headache. If the bus were stopped by Kurds they would look for a foreigner (so I was told) and find only me. I would be held captive and used with the utmost brutality. I wondered whether the Kurds smoked. If not, being their prisoner did not seem so bad.

After dark, at a cold windy pit stop, I bought a glass of yogurt.

“What did you pay for that?” Rashid asked me.

“Twenty thousand,” I said. Fifty cents.

“Life is so expensive here,” he said. “In Antakya you could get that for eight thousand.” Twenty cents.

He was making a return trip. He had arrived in Istanbul the day before to receive an order for his metalworking shop in Antakya. To save money he slept at the bus station and came straight back. He hated Istanbul anyway.

“And these,” he said, waving a pack of cigarettes. “Fifty thousand! Go ahead, take one—”

I read Up at the Villa, in which a pretty widow gets a proposal of marriage from a distinguished man about to take an important post in India. She needs time to think about it. The man departs. That night the woman goes to a party, where a young rascal proposes marriage to her. She laughs at him, saying she does not believe in love, but would like to use her beauty and make an unfortunate man happy for just one night. That same night she picks up an impoverished man who had been a waiter at the party. She takes him to her villa, prepares a meal for him, makes love to him, and then tells him why. The young man is so insulted he shoots himself. She panics and calls the rascal, who helps her get rid of the body. The distinguished man is scandalized when he hears what has happened, and the pretty widow ends up with the rascal, who spirits her away before the body is found.

I liked the idea of a great scheme (marriage to an ambitious and successful man) being undone by a single unthought-out act, but this frantic night was unbelievable. And I objected to the book because it did not sufficiently remove me from the irritating reality of noxious smoke and bad air and coughing passengers in the lurching bus.

Into Ankara, out again, through mountain passes, under snowy cliffs, past cold fields where low fog had gathered in ghostly wisps, and onward between black crags, and above it all a huge ivory cue-ball moon.

“I worked in Saudi Arabia,” a man named Fatih told me at another pit stop in the darkness. “I went to Mecca and Medina.”

“So you made the Hajj?”

“No, no, no. If you do that, you can’t drink alcohol and whatnot afterwards.”

He would purify himself with a Hajj some other time, when he was older, and past any carnal desire.

We eventually came to the middle of Turkey, Tuz Golu, a great lake, with the moon gleaming upon it; and another stop at two in the morning in cold clammy Aksaray, an area well known for its desolation and monotony and mud houses. I stood and stamped my feet and took deep breaths, and then reboarded and read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of neurological case histories. It was a salutary book — Oliver Sacks is full of sympathy for afflicted strangers and he usually determines that these people have developed strengths and gifts as compensation for the supposed defects. Also: “There is often a struggle, and sometimes more interestingly a collusion between the power of pathology and creation.” That was certainly true. If you were happy and normal why would you ever want to write a book? Indeed, why would you be on this bus at all? There was an aspect of dementia to the act of writing as there was to a desire to travel, but as Sacks pointed out, dementia was nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed was often a useful spur to imaginative or creative acts.

As I read this book, dayspring in the shape of a rising tide of pinkness gathered in the sky over the low hills of Anatolia, and the moon still showed in the clear sky. Then, towards Adana, bright daylight heated the bus, and field-workers and vegetable pickers traipsed down the road all bundled up, carrying hoes. Farther on, people bent double were already working in the fields. This green and fertile part of Turkey was chilly and sunny and flat, in the delta of the Seyhan River, the tucked-in corner of the Mediterranean, next to the Bay of Iskenderun.

Iskenderun itself, its puddled streets lined with thick palm trees, lay at the foot of a range of the dark Amanus Mountains, and beyond its small houses, and its onion fields, was the sea again, small waves slapping, the surface hardly disturbed, like the shore of a lake. It was the old sloppy Mediterranean Sea, not a body of water with many moods, but looking shallow and tame and almost exhausted. There was no fishing here, not even any swimming. And this place which Alexander the Great had founded after a great battle — until fairly recently it had been known as Alexandretta — was just a little tiled-roof town. Its beach, littered with windblown trash and dumped junk, was also reputedly the place which, when “the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomitted Jonah upon the dry land,” the land that was this very beach. But here, as elsewhere, the sea is now no more than a backdrop to olive groves and fruit trees.

This province, Hatay, is disputed. The Syrians claim it as rightfully theirs, but the Turks control it. The people themselves speak a heavily guttural Arabized Turkish, and the markets both in Iskenderun and in Antakya — where I gave up and got off the bus and staggered, followed by hawkers and small boys, through the market to a hotel — seemed as Middle Eastern as it was possible to be, without many veils.

Recovering from the bus ride to this town on the border of Syria, I stayed here in Antioch (Antakya) for a night, and the next day hiked from monument to monument — the Roman bridge, the mosque and aqueduct, the Church of Saint Peter. There were ruined fortresses outside of the town, and one of them, the Castle of Cursat, had been built by crusaders.

More impressive to me than anything else was the market at Antakya, which was almost medieval in its bustle and its mud, small boys quarreling and fooling among the fruit stalls and meat markets, and the full floppy costumes of the country people, the women in pantaloons and shawls, the men in beards and gowns. The commerce was brisk — the selling of fruit and fish, the retailing of tonics and potions — and it was also a meeting place of people from the mountains and the seashore, from Turkey and Syria and Lebanon. It was not a covered bazaar but rather a large area of rough ground, where people were yakking and striking deals and watching staticky television and talking over bundles and sacks of lemons and heaped-up blankets, as boys rushed around selling glasses of tea on trays, or barrows of dried fruits and nuts. Cripples, beggars, beards, deformed people with boils and knobs on their faces, all the sects of Islam, and mud puddles and flaming braziers and the sizzle of meat, and a great sense of filth and life.

In this remote place people came up to me, and it was either a shaven-headed boy or else a hobbling old man, and they greeted me in Turkish, asking “Saat kach?”—What time is it? — because I was wearing a wrist-watch. I was perversely gratified because they had asked in Turkish, which proved that my long bus trip had had the effect of making me seem somewhat Turquoise, as rumpled and muddy as the rest of them. So I went about feeling anonymous and happy. The disciples of Jesus spent a year in Antioch preaching and it was in Antioch (Acts 11: 26) that, perhaps in answer to a puzzled question, “What sort of Jews are you?” they first began to call themselves “Christians.”

Looking for another bus to the Syrian coast, I was told that the western border was closed and that I would have to enter Syria by the Bab el Hawa — the Gate of the Wind — and proceed to Aleppo, before heading for Latakia, on the coast. It was hundreds of miles out of my way, but it was all right with me. I had heard that Aleppo was a pleasant place with a famous bazaar. And there was a railway train from there through the mountains to the Mediterranean.

There were only four of us on the Aleppo bus. Turks are not welcome in Syria, and not many Syrians ever get across the border. I sat with Yusof, a talkative and untruthful-seeming Tunisian who gave me several conflicting reasons for going to Syria.

“See this? Tunisian passport,” he said, shuffling the thing. “And this is an Iraqi passport. Why? Ha! You have so many questions.”

But even when I stopped asking questions he volunteered some strange information.

“I have a U.S. visa. I have lived in Verona. You speak Italian? Buon giorno! I sell gold — no, not always.”

The young couple were Turks from Bulgaria. They sat, holding hands, looking nervous.

We passed through a pretty countryside, the road just wide enough for one vehicle, poplars and stone cottages and plowed fields, and soon the Syrian border — the no-man’s-land, fenced with barbed wire, the meadows filled with crimson poppies and leggy asphodels.

“That is a Kurdish village,” Yusof said, indicating a cluster of huts. How did he know that? Farther along the narrow road he said, “Mister, have you been to Israel?”

I hedged, and denied it, and Yusof smoked and told me a few more lies, and the bus broke down.

The problem was the fuel line. The driver yanked up the floorboards and played with some rubber tubes, blowing on them. An hour passed. I got out and marveled at the wildflowers, and then sat and scribbled some notes. Another hour passed. The sky was gray. Surely the border would be closed if we waited too long? I was pacing up and down the side of the road, though the others, fatalistic Muslims, simply sat and waited.

“Yusof, why don’t we flag down the next car that comes through and take it to the border?”

“Best thing, mister, is be very careful,” he said. And he pointed cautiously and became conspiratorial. “Over there is Syria. That is another country. You hear what I am saying? Another country. So we wait.”

The driver tried the engine. It farted and died. He kept trying, stamping on the accelerator, twisting the key. I reckoned that very soon the battery would be dead. But after some minutes he fired it up and we got aboard and jogged along to Turkish customs. That was simple enough, a rubber stamp, a farewell. But the Syrian border was an obstacle course.

Yusof said, “Be careful.”

Now I noticed how weirdly he was dressed, in a shiny shirt and flared pants and clopping high-heeled shoes and gold chains around his neck and dense sunglasses. In spite of this, he was doing his best to be inconspicuous.

A small number of people jostled for attention at a desk, where a bored and rather indifferent soldier ignored them. I thrust my passport over their heads and, as though amused by my insolence, he snatched it and said, “American!” and laughed. I did not see my passport again for about an hour.

In the meantime, I found Yusof lurking. He said he wanted to buy me a drink. We had coffee, while he held a chattering conversation with some Syrians. I noticed that there were large portraits of President Assad all over the frontier. He was a man with an odd profile — beaky nose, big chin, surmounted by the squarest head I had ever seen. His portrait at its most accurate was like a cartoon parody: misshapen and villainous, his combed-over hairdo varied from portrait to portrait. His suit was too tight, his neck too thin, his tie ridiculous, his smile insipid. As for his politics (to quote I Kings II), “He was an adversary to Israel … and he abhorred Israel, and reigned over Syria.”

But there was another portrait — a younger man, with a slim stubbly face and sunglasses and army fatigues.

“Who’s that, Yusof?”

“No,” he said, meaning, Don’t ask. He paddled with one hand in a cautioning gesture.

The delay at the border today was caused by a group of Syrians smuggling shirts and pants in large suitcases. The absurdity of it was that while these smugglers opened their cases, revealing stacks of shirts in plastic bags, huge trucks rumbled past. They were German, and they were loaded with crates of German machinery, from a firm called Mannesmann. The crates were stamped For the Ministry of Technology, Baghdad, Iraq. Six of these vast flatbed trucks. They were headed towards Iraq, through Syria — and they were waved through by Syrian soldiers. It seemed to make little difference to anyone that Iraq was subject to U.N. sanctions and such a shipment of German machine parts was illegal. In the meantime the shirt smugglers were bullied and denounced.

Yusof took me aside. He put his hand over his mouth and muttered, “That is Assad’s son. He died. Don’t talk.”

We were summoned to the office and handed our passports. And then we were on our way. Those men wearing dark glasses and sipping tea, Yusof said. They were not travelers. They were members of the mukhabarat—Syria’s secret police. All this in a whisper, Yusof’s hand over his mouth.

“Here I like,” Yusof said. We were in a rocky landscape, with wide stripes of green. “Aleppo is good. I drink. I eat. I disco. I fuck. But—” He leaned over. “I don’t talk.”

Across the low hills some miles farther were minarets and a citadel on a bluff, and squat buildings: Aleppo. After all the small towns and villages of Turkish Hatay, this was like my myopic mirage, the distant vision which blurs and produces a sort of Middle East capriccio, blending beautiful rotting buildings with ugly new ones, the whole of it sifted and sprinkled with dust. Many places in the eastern Mediterranean looked that way to me, a hodgepodge of building styles surmounted by earthen-colored domes and the slender pencils of minarets.

“Come with me,” Yusof said. “I know this place.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

We were standing by the roadside, among honking taxis and buses, and within sight of twelve billboard-sized portraits of President Hafez al-Assad, Father of the Nation. But they were not as odd as the smaller but far more numerous portraits of his son. They were pasted to walls and to poles, they were airbrushed and stenciled onto masonry, they were stuck in every shop window; and every car in Aleppo displayed the young man’s picture, many of them gilt-framed, on a rear window shrine.

“You’re busy?” Yusof looked very puzzled, which was my intention.

It’s that man again, I thought, and asked Yusof his name.

He gave me a pained smile, and I realized that I did not need a ruse to drive him away. All I had to do was ask him my usual questions.

Yusof covered his mouth, and on the pretext of drawing on a cigarette, he muttered, “His son.” Yusof, although not Syrian, had the superstitious Syrian horror of speaking Assad’s name. He glanced around and added, “His name is Basil.”

“Basil?”

A wild look distorted Yusof’s features. I had said it too loud. He compressed his face in a furtive frown for a moment and then hurried away.

The cult of Basil had taken possession of Syria. Though it was a touchy matter, and politically suspect, I looked into it a bit. It was not easy. Syrians were voluble about everything except matters pertaining to their president. They hung pictures of Assad everywhere, they looked at Assad’s face constantly — that square head, that mustache, that insincere smile of fake benevolence, that hairpiece. A Syrian was never away from the gaze of this man. Assad had been staring at them for twenty-five years. He was as big as life and twice as ugly. But they rarely spoke about him, they almost never uttered his name.

“Big Brother is watching you,” a witty young Arab woman said to me later in Damascus. His titles are “Father-Leader” (El Ab el Khaad), and also Comrade, Struggler, General Secretary, President, Commander of the Nation.

“Or you just put ‘First’ in front of a word and that is a title,” a rebellious Syrian said to me in a low voice. “For example, First Teacher, First General, First Commander.”

Like many torturers, dictators, monomaniacs and tyrants, the most sinister and popular of Assad’s titles was “Friend.” Recently he had given himself a new honorific: Abu Basil—“Father of Basil.”

I asked Syrians to translate the inscriptions under Basil’s portrait. Basil the Martyr! was very common. But they also said, Staff Sergeant! Martyr! Cadet! Parachutist! Comrade! Beloved! Son! Knight!

Martyr—Shaheed—was an interesting word to use for dead Basil. The term was full of Koranic implications, usually describing a warrior who is sacrificed to the faith, going smiling to his glorious reward in Allah’s heaven. Palestinian suicide bombers are martyrs. Any victim of the Israeli secret police, the Mossad, is a martyr. The young man who knifed Naguib Mahfouz was described by his fanatic friends as a martyr after he was hanged in Cairo.

Basil’s martyrdom took place in January 1994, on the road to Damascus airport as the young man, habitually driving fast, sped to catch a plane for Frankfurt where he was embarking on a skiing holiday in the Alps. He reached the speed of 150 miles per hour (the figure 240 kilometers per hour was part of the mythology of Basil’s death) and he lost control of his car, and was killed instantly when it crashed. He was thirty-two and was known as someone who liked fast cars. After forty days of mourning, an enormous statue was erected to him in his father’s home village of Qardaha. The statue depicted the young man being propelled upward on a beam of light, his father (“Father-Leader”) standing at the bottom of the beam, and the son (“Martyr,” “Cadet, “Parachutist”) taking flight.

A younger son, Bashar, twenty-nine, took Basil’s place as his father’s successor. He had been studying quietly in London. He was summoned home, and is now next in line to the throne of his dynastic-minded father. Meanwhile, Assad’s rambunctious brother Rifaat (who, asserting the secularism of Syria, killed twenty thousand of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1982 in Hamah) also has ambitions but keeps to himself in a villa on a hill outside Damascus. Rifaat’s portrait is not to be seen anywhere.

I had arrived by road from rural Turkey and been plunged into Syria, the chaotic and friendly city of Aleppo. I liked it as soon as I arrived. But I was too tired to take in anything except the cult of Basil. I found a hotel and had a nap. I woke in the dark, then went back to sleep until the next day.

Aleppo was gritty, ramshackle, and not very big. It had busy dusty streets, dust everywhere, in this sprawling itching place that is everyone’s idea of a city in the Middle East, rotting and unthreatening, mysterious, filled with the smells of food and scorched oil and damp wool and decaying bricks. It was not like a city at all, but rather a large provincial town, with a mixed population of Arabs, Armenians, Kurds and even a community of Jews. It had landmarks — the park, the citadel, the bazaar, the mosque, the railway station. I took a bus to St. Simeon’s Basilica. Simeon Stylites, as he is sometimes known, sat on a tall pillar for thirty years to mortify his flesh, haranguing the faithful from the top of this column.

I am not a pilgrim — I dislike the word in fact, and as with other religious sites I detected no odor of sanctity at St. Simeon’s, only a slight whiff of piety — humility, not holiness, and the definite sense of theater that I had felt in Jerusalem. I had sensed this often in places reputed to be holy, not sanctity at all, but a turbulent suggestion of passion and conflict.

Back in the crooked streets of Aleppo I realized that what I liked best about the place was a liberating sense that everything in the city was reachable on foot. Also Syria had the worst telephone system I had so far seen in the Mediterranean, and so I was never tempted to use the phone or send a fax. This also freed me from worrying that I had anything urgent to attend to; communication with the outside world was impossible. It invigorated me to feel out of touch, and it concentrated my mind on where I was.

I had been anxious about my trip to the coast until I walked to the railway station — a funny little Frenchified station with the usual Assad hagiography in any number of ludicrous murals — and saw that there were three trains a day to Latakia. At the station I engaged three young men — medical students — in a conversation about the murals. They immediately clammed up and made eye signals and hand gestures and all sorts of nonverbal suggestions to change the subject. This was what Albania had been like under “Friend” Hoxha.

It was not fidgeting caution but real fear — of, I supposed, the mukhabarat. Until late in 1994 there were six thousand political prisoners. Assad released some old sick prisoners, to impress the United States and to make himself seem magnanimous. But it was clearly not a country in which there was any dissent.

The pride of Aleppo is its bazaar, a vast covered souk crisscrossed with narrow lanes and the usual demarcations — silver here, gold there, carpets somewhere else; small cramped neighborhoods selling shoes, or scarves, or fruit, or spices. Tinsmiths, weavers, glassblowers. It served much more than its city. Everyone in northern Syria used the bazaar at Aleppo.

“Meester — I have sold nothing today. You must buy something!”

Winter was colder in Syria than I had expected. The days started almost frostily; at noon it was warm, then the temperature dropped through the afternoon, and at night it was cold again, everyone in sweaters and jackets. I decided to buy a scarf in the bazaar, not a two-dollar polka-dot Palestinian keffieh to wrap around my head, but perhaps the sort of five-dollar wool keffieh that served the nomads.

One of the characteristics of a Middle Eastern bazaar is that thirty stalls sell exactly the same merchandise, but the hawkers differ in their sales pitch, which are thirty kinds of attitudes ranging from a silent glowering from a man squatting on his haunches at the rear of the shop, sulking because you are walking past, to the active nagging of the stall-holder chasing you and plucking your sleeve—“Meester!”

I was looking for a warm scarf, but I was also looking for English speakers. I soon found five of them sitting among bolts of silk.

“Come here, Meester! Hello! Good evening, and how are you?”

This man introduced himself as Alla-Aldin—“Aladdin”—Akkad, and his friends and colleagues as Moustafa, Mohammed, Ahmed and Lateef. They were all young and insolent looking, yapping at each other.

“You are a French?”

“American,” I said.

“You are a Yank,” Akkad said. “That is what people call you. Please sit down. Drink some tea.”

I intended to buy a scarf and therefore accepted the invitation. I would have been more careful in a carpet shop. I sat with them and we talked about the cold weather, how damp it was in the bazaar, my travels in Turkey, my impressions of Syria, and so forth.

Moustafa said, “Do you mind if we call you a Yank?”

“Not at all. But what do people call you?”

“They call us donkeys,” Akkad said. “Because of the donkeys wandering around the bazaar. We don’t care. Donkeys are good animals. And we wander too.”

“What do you call Turkish people?”

“‘Mustache,’ ” Mohammed said. And to his friends, “Yes?”

Akkad explained, “Because they all have mustaches.”

“What about Egyptians?”

“We call them ‘Take-Your-Watch,’ because they are thieves.”

“Jordanians?”

“‘They-Only-See-Themselves,’ ” Moustafa said. “They are selfish, they think about themselves all the time.”

“What about Israelis?” I asked.

“Worse than Jordanians,” Akkad said.

“‘The sun shines out of their arseholes,’ we say. It is an Arabic expression for snobbish,” Moustafa said. “They think it, you see. So we call them ‘arseholes’ for short.”

“I don’t like to say this word,” Akkad muttered. “But it’s true they are very snobbish. They think they are better than everyone.”

“Are you married?” Moustafa asked me.

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“I am married and so is he,” Akkad said, indicating Moustafa. He pointed to Lateef, who apparently did not speak English — he smiled but said nothing. “He is a horse’s hoof.”

“Not a donkey?” I said.

“And I am a ginger beer,” Akkad said. “Although I am married.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It is slang,” Akkad said, and took out a book. He wagged it at me and said, “This Yank does not understand!”

The book was titled Australian Slang, and it was inscribed to Akkad from Ray, an Australian, in big affectionate blue loopy handwriting.

“My old boyfriend,” Akkad said. He batted his eyelashes at me. “He was a traveler like you.”

I leafed through the book of slang. Horse’s hoof — poof. Ginger beer — queer. Over a year paddling in the Happy Isles and I get a lesson in Aussie slang from a Syrian in Aleppo?

“I get it,” I said. “But didn’t you say you were married?”

“Yes. I just found out I am a homosexual one month ago, after five years of married life.”

“Isn’t that a little inconvenient?” I asked.

“Only for my wife,” Akkad said.

“But I like women,” Moustafa said.

“I like men,” Akkad said. “So does he. And he. And you see this man there”—another young man had paused in the lane of the bazaar to mutter to Lateef—“he was my boyfriend once. You see how he is ignoring me?”

“I agree with Moustafa,” I said. “I prefer women.”

“Women smell like omelets,” Akkad said.

“Do you like omelets?”

“No,” he said. “I like men. They smell like watermelons.”

“‘A woman for duty. A boy for pleasure. A melon for ecstasy.’ Isn’t that an Arab proverb?” I said.

“I have never heard it,” Akkad said. “I don’t understand.”

Moustafa cupped his hands at his chest to suggest breasts and said, “I like these melons on a woman!”

“I don’t like them,” Akkad said. “How old are you?”

I told him.

“No,” he said. “But if you are that old you must be happy. Very happy.”

“Yes, he is happy,” Moustafa said.

“I am happy,” I said. And thought: Yes, drinking tea in this bazaar on a chilly evening in Aleppo, in the farthest corner of the Mediterranean, listening to their silly talk, sensing a welcome in it, the hospitality of casual conversation, feeling I could ask them almost anything and get an answer; I am happy.

“Why did you come here?” Akkad said.

“To buy a scarf,” I said.

“I will not sell you a scarf now. Moustafa and Ahmed will not sell you a scarf. You know why? Because we want you to come back here tomorrow to talk with us.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Later I went to a restaurant and had hot bread and hummus, baba ghanouj and eggplant, salad and spicy fish chunks. I was joined by a student, Ahmed Haj’Abdo, who was studying medicine at the Aleppo medical college. He said he wanted to get high marks, so that he could study abroad and specialize. I introduced the topic of Assad, hoping to get more colorful information about the cult of Basil. Mr. Haj’Abdo got flustered and searched the restaurant desperately with his agitated eyes.

“Sorry,” I said.

He just smiled and then we talked about the weather.

The next day, my last in Aleppo, I went back to Akkad and bought a head scarf and asked him the best way to Latakia. There were so many ways — buses, “pullman,” minivans, taxis, shared cars, the train.

Akkad said, “The best way. You mean quickest? Safest? Most comfortable? Cheapest? What?”

“What does ‘safest’ mean?”

“The road is dangerous. It winds around the mountains. Sometimes the cars and buses go off the road and into the valleys. People die.”

“Train is safest and best,” Moustafa said.

“That’s what I always say.”

My first-class ticket to Latakia on the early train the next morning was two dollars.

There were a hundred or more Syrians in the waiting room of the railway station the following morning. In cold countries that are poor there is often a sartorial strangeness, people dressed differently and weirdly, abandoning fashion for warmth. Syria this winter morning was that way. There were women in black drapes, their faces covered, looking like dark Shmoos, and others like nuns, and still more in old-fashioned dresses and old fur-trimmed coats. Men wore gowns and women wore quilted coats and many people wore leather jackets and odd hats. There were Gypsies in brightly colored dresses, with thick skirts, and there were soldiers. The well-dressed and watchful secret police looked very secure and went about in pairs.

There was no such thing as a Syrian face. There were many faces, of a sort that was common in Europe and America — pale skin, red hair, blue eyes, as well as nose-heavy profiles and dark eyes and swarthy skin. Some could have been Spanish or French or even English. There was a Syrian Huck Finn face with freckles, and tousled hair. There was a Semitic face — nagging auntie with a mustache. There were people who looked like me. I was sure of this, because every so often I was approached and asked questions in Arabic, and the questioner was puzzled and abashed when I replied in English.

It was a cold sunny day in Aleppo, six in the morning, hardly anyone on the street, and so the rats were bold, foraging in the gutters as I kicked along noisily to keep them away. I wore a sweater and a jacket and a scarf. The rats ran ahead of me, nibbling garbage. One scampered on, glancing back at me at intervals, and panting, like an overexcited pet.

The 7:20 Express to Latakia was a beat-up train, with terrible coaches in second class and passable ones in first. But all the windows were so dirty it was hard to see out, and many were cracked, the sort of dense spider web of cracks that prevented anything from being clearly visible.

With my notebook on my lap, I wrote about the fellows in the bazaar and then, because I was short of books, reread The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the chapter on “street neurology,” thinking how resourceful Oliver Sacks was in walking the streets of New York City, diagnosing the ills of the people raving or chattering. In another place he quoted Nietzsche: “I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them … And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit.”

The ticket collector wore a dark suit and well-shined shoes and he smoked a cigarette. In his entourage were two soldiers and two flunkies. He snapped his fingers at each passenger and under the gaze of the soldiers — who were fat older men, straight out of Sergeant Bilko’s motor pool — he directed one of his flunkies to retrieve the ticket. Without touching it he examined it, and the second flunky tore it and returned it to the passenger. Five men, each with a particular role: a miniature bureaucracy in the aisle of the railway train.

Many offices I had seen in Syria were like that: several people doing one job, consulting, discussing, sharing the problem; or just being social, drinking tea, smoking, taking no responsibility.

Showing through the cracked windows of the train the suburbs of Aleppo had a fragmented and cubist quality, a wall of tenements as assorted puzzle pieces. We were soon in the countryside, the Syrian countryside where the mountains that rise parallel to the west coast, the Jabel an Nusayriyah, are among the loveliest in the Mediterranean. Eastern and southern Syria is desert, but this was a landscape of green cozy valleys and stone cottages — gardens, shepherds, wheat fields, olive groves and fruit trees. I had not expected such a fertile and friendly-looking land. Later, when I saw the desert, I realized that my stereotype was that — what the Syrians called the sahara, limitless waste.

But here it was peaceful, meadows of sheep nibbling flowers. I had expected gun emplacements and artillery men glowering through binoculars, not these stolid rustics clopping along on donkeys, and the lovely white villages of small domed houses; each settlement, surrounded by plowed fields, had a well and market and a mosque.

A man strode through my railway car, climbed onto a seat, removed a lightbulb from a ceiling fixture, and plugged in a tape deck. For the rest of the trip he fed tapes of screechy music into this machine.

The meadows in the distance were like crushed velvet, and closer they were scattered with wildflowers and banked by stands of sturdy blue-green pines. Even that loud music could not distract me from admiring a landscape I had never seen or heard about, and the thrill was that it was ancient, biblical-looking, the land of conquering, slaughtering David and the Valley of Salt. At Jisr ash Shughur on the Orontes River there were flowers everywhere and the town itself lay on the crest of a distant hill, as white as the white stone ridge it was built upon. We were hardly any distance from the Turkish border, and passing alongside it, but these villages were not at all like Turkish ones, either in the design of their houses or the way the people were dressed.

We penetrated the big green mountain range on our way to the shore, and circled the slopes of these peculiarly Middle Eastern-looking heights — so old were they, having been mountains for so long, so tame and rounded, they seemed domesticated by the people who had been trampling them and letting their goats and sheep canter over them, nibbling them since the beginning of the world. They were gentle slopes, with soft cliffs and unthreatening gullies and no peaks, green all over, with pine woods and villages in their valleys. They were not at all like the fierce mountains in the wilderness, with their sharp peaks and sheer cliffs and their raw and serrated ridges and their cliff faces gleaming like the metal of a knife blade.

That was something that I had learned about the Mediterranean. There was not a single point anywhere on the whole irregular shore that had not known human footprints. Every inch of it had been charted and named — most places had two or three names, some had half a dozen, an overlay of nomenclature, especially here in the tendentious and rivalrous republics of the Levant, that could be very confusing.

Three and a half hours after leaving Aleppo (Halab, El Haleb) we were speeding across a flat sunny plain of date palms and orange and olive trees, towards Latakia. It had been a long inland detour, but I was back on the shore of the Mediterranean.

I walked from the station to the center of town and found a hotel. After lunch, I walked to the port. I was followed and pestered by curb-crawling taxis in which young men sat and honked their horns. The only way to discourage them was to hire one — and anyway, I wanted to go north of Latakia, to see the ruins of Ugarit.

That was how I met Riaz, an unreliable man with an unreliable car. He spoke a little English. Yes, he knew Ugarit. Yes, we would go there. But first he had a few errands to run. This allowed me to see the whole of Latakia in a short time. It was not an attractive place. The only beach was some miles outside of the city at the laughably named Côte d’Azur, where on an empty road, a deserted hotel, the Meridien, sat on a muddy shore. That area had the melancholy of all bad architectural ideas exposed to the full glare of the sun.

“Who is that?” I asked Riaz as we passed statues of Assad. There were many statues of Father-Leader here.

Riaz laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. It was not a joking matter to stare at the statues, however silly they seemed. One statue in Latakia showed Assad hailing a taxi — his hand raised. In another he was beckoning—“I have a bone to pick with you, sonny!”—and in yet another he looked, with both arms out, like a deranged man about to take a dive into a pool, fully clothed. “I will crush you like this!” could have been inscribed on the plinth of a statue which depicted Assad clasping his hands rather violently, and a statue at the abandoned sports complex at Latakia showed the Commander of the Nation with his arm up, palm forward, in a traffic cop’s gesture of “Stop!”

Any country which displays more than one statue of a living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. Leaving aside the fact that nature had not endowed this spindle-shanked and wispy-haired man in his tight suit to be cast in bronze, the unflattering statues still seemed provocative and irritating. In a hard-up place how could anyone be indifferent or willingly justify such expenditure? Syria was another country, like those of Mao and Stalin and Hoxha, of silly semaphoring statues of the same foolish old man, and in time to come they too would end up being bulldozed onto a scrap heap.

“What is his name?” I asked Riaz.

Riaz said, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” and looked wildly around in the traffic.

Two or three miles north of the city was Ras Shamrah. It had been an unimportant village until, in 1928, a farmer plowing on a nearby hill bumped his plow blade against the top edge of a symmetrical wall, buried in the ground. Further digging revealed it to be the wall of a large building, a palace in fact, and in time the foundations of an entire city were uncovered, thirty-six hectares of a royal town which was dug up in stages throughout the 1930s. That sort of discovery — even the detail of the plow blade — had happened many times before in the Middle East (and it was also a poor farmer in China who — with a hoe — found the terra-cotta warriors at Xian); peasant plowmen were probably the world’s first archaeologists. But Ugarit yielded a real treasure in the form of small beadlike clay tablets on which was inscribed the precursor of the alphabet I am using now. (Guidebook: “The writing on the tablets is widely accepted as being the earliest known alphabet. It was adapted by the Greeks, then the Romans, and it is from this script that all alphabets are derived.”) There were trinkets, too, bracelets and beads and spear points and knives; but the implications of the tablets the shape and size of a child’s finger bone were that this might be the earliest examples of human jotting.

Ali the caretaker apologized before charging me four dollars in Syrian piastres — it was almost his week’s pay — to look at the ruins. And he followed me, pointing to the crumbled walls and weedy plots, saying, “Palace … Library … Well … Aqueduct … Flight of stairs … House … Archway … Stables … Mausoleum …”

It was no more than a mute ground plan, spread over several hills, where with their narrow hooves balanced on the flinty walls goats cropped grass and pretty poppies grew wild. Having been excavated, it had been so neglected it was becoming overgrown, with rubble obscuring many of the walls; no pathways, no signs, no indication at all of what had been what. Ugarit (“once the greatest city in the entire Mediterranean”) was turning back into a buried city. It had been looted of all its trinkets and artifacts — they were on display in the Damascus Museum.

I liked being here alone, and felt it was all a throwback to an earlier time on the Mediterranean shore, when a traveler might stumble upon an ancient site and be shown around by a simple soul who lived nearby. The temples and villas of rural Italy, and Carthage and Pompeii and the ancient marble structures of Greece, had once been treated like this — just crumbling curiosities, where goats and sheep sheltered. Every so often a peasant would raid them for building blocks or marble slabs. That was definitely a feature of the Mediterranean — the temples turned into churches, the churches into ruins, the ruins buried until they became quarries for anyone who wanted to build a hut. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — we have the evidence of splendid engravings — Greece and Italy looked just like Ugarit did today, the ruins were novelties, broken cellars and fallen walls and stairs leading nowhere and tombs robbed of their artifacts and bones.

Sitting on a wall to admire it — the sun on the flowers and the grass that grew higher than the ruins — I was approached by Ali again.

“Alphabet there!” he said.

He pointed to a small enclosure, where in a shady muddy corner in a clump of weeds, the tablets had been found. It was as though it was sacred ground. In a sense it had been hallowed, by printed words, some of the first in this hemisphere. Five thousand years had passed since then. And here, in Syria, the very place that had given the world this elegant script, half the people were still illiterate.

On the way back to town, I asked Riaz, “Are there any ships that go from here to Cyprus?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“No.”

“So can I get a ship to Cyprus from Latakia?”

“I think.”

“You think yes?”

“I think no.”

He was right — no ferries ran anymore, though there were plenty of container ships in the port. The town was small and tidy and sunny, and with vaguely European architecture, unlike cold, dusty and oriental Aleppo. It seemed to me amazing that in the space of a single morning I had passed from one climate to another; and not only the weather here, but aspects of the atmosphere, were identical to a hundred other places I had seen on the Mediterranean shore. Latakia was another example of a town that had much more in common with a port in Greece or Albania or Sardinia than any of its own inland towns, the sunny Mediterranean culture of the languor, the bougainvillea and palms and stucco house, the seaside promenade.

“You want to see Lateen?”

He meant a Christian church, a Latin. (Christians in Syria are called Masihi for their belief in the Messiah.) There was one in Latakia, a Frenchified two-steeple cathedral dating perhaps from the 1930s. (The French had controlled Syria from 1926 until independence in 1946.) There was a sense of life in Latakia that was self-contained; the town was seldom visited by any foreigners — foreigners hardly came to Syria and when they did they kept to Damascus and avoided the rather stagnant and vandalized coast. Better than any bricks and mortar were the tangerines and oranges of Latakia. I paid off Riaz, and bought some fruit, and walked the streets, and went to bed early.

Sixty miles down the coast, two hours on the slow bus, was Tartus, a new town enclosing an ancient walled city. I walked around it and thought: How has it changed? The people still lived among goat turds and foul garbage piles and they scrubbed their laundry in washtubs and hung it from their windows, where the sun struck through the archways. The children played in the narrow lanes where open drains bore foul water to the sewers. Rats darted between bricks and in the ruined nave of a church there was more laundry. There were old and new parts of the walled city, but it was hard to tell them apart. People had extended the old houses, added rooms and stairways and vaulted ceilings and cubicles. Old men still sat under the arches of the city gate. I imagined that people here on the Syrian coast had more or less always lived like this, apparently higgledy-piggledy, but actually with great coherence, using all the available space, protected by the city walls and the privacy of their solid stone houses, in this honeycomb of an old town.

There was an island just off shore called Arwad. I wanted to look at it, but I could not find any boatman willing to take me there. So I walked along the beach. Tartus had the filthiest beach I had seen anywhere in the entire Mediterranean: it was mud and litter and sewage and oil slick. Perhaps that too was just as it had always been, the disorder and filth and carelessness. Swimming as a recreation and the craze for a suntan were recent novelties. In terms of its being regarded as an enormous sewer by the people who lived on its shore, the Mediterranean was perhaps no different from any other sea in the world.

“The sea in Western culture represents space, vacancy, primordial chaos,” Jonathan Raban wrote to me when I asked him why every sea on earth is treated like a toilet. Jonathan, one of my oldest friends, was the editor of The Oxford Book of the Sea. The biblical “waters” implying emptiness and chaos is specifically the Mediterranean. Jonathan indicated a passage in The Enchafed Flood in which Auden warmed to this theme of the disorderly sea: “The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelation notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that ‘there was no more sea’.”

“Put rubbish into it, and it magically disappears,” Jonathan said. “Water being the purifying element, you can’t pollute it — by definition.” Before the middle of the eighteenth century, “the sea was a socially invisible place; a space so bereft of respectable life that it was like a black hole. What you did in or on the sea simply didn’t count, which is partly why the seaside became known as a place of extraordinary license.” And he went on, “The sea wasn’t — isn’t — a place; it was undifferentiated space. It lay outside of society, outside of the world of good manners and social responsibilities. It was also famously the resort of filthy people — lowcaste types, like fishermen … It was a social lavatory, where the dregs landed up.”

Nothing held me in Tartus. Wishing to see the great Crusader castle known variously as the Krac des Chevaliers and Qal’at al-Hisn, I made a deal with a taxi driver named Abdallah, who said he would take me there and then on to Homs, where I could get a bus or a train to Damascus.

“Lebanon!” he cried out after twenty minutes or so, gesturing towards the dark hills to the south.

And then he turned north off the road and headed for the heights of the mountain range that protected the interior of Syria, and commanded a view of the whole coast. At a strategic point, above the only valley that allowed access, was the most beautiful castle imaginable. After a childhood spent reading fairy tales, and believing in valiant deeds, and associating every act of love, chivalry, piety and valor — however specious they seemed in retrospect — it is impossible to belittle the Crusader castles of the Mediterranean, the scenes where such deeds were first defined for such a child as I was.

The knight in armor, a sword in one hand, his crested flag in the other, is such a potent symbol of virtue that I never questioned it. I was inspired by the fantasy and the idea, not the historical truth of the Crusader Knights. To a great extent, Westerners derive their notions of self-sacrifice and morality and romantic love from the stories of Crusaders — and incidentally their prejudices against Muslims and Jews — and a sense of style, too, of jousting and armor and pennants and castles. The Krac was the epitome of that sort of dream castle, with ramparts and dungeons and symmetrical fortifications, and a chapel and stately watchtowers.

“Neither a ruin nor a showplace,” T. E. Lawrence wrote of the Krac in his obscure book on Crusader castles. In 1936 Lawrence walked one thousand miles in the three hottest months, to do his survey of these magnificent structures. And he was not exaggerating when he called it the “best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world.”

Leaving the castle, I said to Abdallah, “How far is it to Damascus?”

Giving me the distance in kilometers, it seemed to be little more than a hundred miles. There were still a few hours of daylight. We made another deal. He would take me there for forty dollars.

It was a rash move. I should have looked closer at his car. The road passed behind the mountains that border Lebanon, Al Jabal ash Sharqi. More important, the road passed along the edge of the Syrian desert.

“Sahara!” Abdallah yelled at the wasteland out the window.

Sheep cropped grass on the western side of the road. On the eastern side they would have starved. Camps of nomads, dark tents and flocks of animals were visible in the distance.

Just before darkness fell the engine faltered and Abdallah cursed, and the car replied, coughing one-syllable complaints, and then we were stuck.

“Okay, okay,” Abdallah said. To prove he was confident he took my picture and he screamed into the wind.

His high spirits were unconvincing. It was an electrical fault, he said. He waved to a passing car and said he would be right back. Then he was sped into the failing light, and dusk fell. I sat in the car, tuning my shortwave radio — news of the Israelis shelling southern Lebanon and blockading the fishing ports. Every so often a large truck went by, and the thud of its slipstream hit Abdallah’s car and shook it, and me.

Cold and unsettled at the edge of this desert, feeling thwarted, this enforced isolation filled my mind with memories of injustice — put-downs, misunderstandings, unresolved disputes, abusive remarks, rudeness, arguments I had lost, humiliations. Some of these instances went back many years. For a reason I could not explain, I thought of everything that had ever gone wrong in my life. I kept telling myself, “So what?” and “Never mind,” but it was no good. I could not stop the flow of unpleasant instances, and I was tormented.

From time to time, I laughed to think I was so removed mentally from Syria, but then I concluded that being in the middle of this desert had something to do with it. It was pitch dark and silent except for when the occasional trucks thundered by. I supposed that I was fearful and disgusted; I disliked the desert, I had been abandoned by Abdallah in this howling wilderness, where there was darkness and no water.

A pair of oncoming headlights wobbled off the road. Abdallah got out and approached the car laughing, carrying a gas can. Saying it was an electrical fault had been a face-saver.

It was late. Returning his gas can to the town of Deir Atiyeh, he stopped the car and I told him I was bailing out. There ensued a great whinging argument, as he pleaded, berated, complained and demanded more money than we had agreed on. I bought you oranges! he howled. I thought: I hate this nagging man. Then I said: Do I care? I gave him what he wanted and swore at him, and afterwards realized that the whole incident irritated me because I had been planning to tip him the very amount he had demanded.

In Deir Atiyeh, where I stayed the night, I had time to reflect on Assad’s personality cult. There was a large statue of the Father-Leader skating — perhaps on thin ice — in the center of Deir Atiyeh. There were also signs which a helpful citizen translated for me: “Smile! You Are In Deir Atiyeh!” “Be Happy — We Are Building the Country!” and “We in Deir Atiyeh Are All Soldiers of Hafez Assad.”

I have to call my informant Aziz, which was not his name, or else he will be persecuted and thrown into prison — the Syrian cure for dissenters — when the Commander of the Nation reads what I have written. “Aziz” was defiant. He said Assad’s vanity was ridiculous. “He was saluted at school each morning,” he said, when the kiddies entered the classroom. They chanted, “Hafez Assad, our leader forever!” and another one that started, “With blood, with soul, we sacrifice ourselves to you!” And it was he who told me that his palace in Damascus, built at a cost of $120 million — and of course no one but the Commander was allowed to enter it — was called Kasr el Sharb, The People’s Palace.

This glass and steel monstrosity, like a massive airline terminal, on a high bluff overlooking Damascus was almost the first thing I saw the next day when I reached the city. It can be seen from every part of the city; that is obviously one of its important features. The structure was as truculent and unreadable and unsmiling, as forbidding, as remote as the man himself. Vast and featureless, it could be a prison or a fortress, and in a sense it is. Assad has almost no contact with the people, and is seldom seen in public. He is all secrets, a solitary king-emperor. There are rumors that he is sick, that his son’s death was a shock, that he is in seclusion. Some days he is shown on the front page of the Syria Times sitting rather uncomfortably in a large chair, apparently nodding at a visiting dignitary.

Beneath Assad’s palace, Damascus lay, biscuit-colored, the chill of morning still upon it, the new suburbs, the ancient city, the souk, the mosques and churches, the snarled traffic, the perambulating Damascenes. For reasons of religion and commerce — its shrines, its mosques, its churches — Damascus is heavily visited. It is an ancient city, so old it is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (14:15–16) — Jerusalem is not mentioned until the Book of Joshua (10:1–2). Unlike Jerusalem, which as an old walled city and bazaar it somewhat resembles, Damascus is the destination of few Western tourists; but it is dense with its neighbors from the desert and the shore. It is the souk and the shrine for the entire region. “Damascus is our souk,” a man in distant Latakia told me. It is everyone’s souk. And the great Omayyad Mosque, built thirteen hundred years ago to a grandiose design, is the destination of many pilgrims. Beirut is only a short drive — two hours at most — and so there were Lebanese here too; and Iraqis, stifled by sanctions, shopping their hearts out; Nawar people, Gypsies from the desert, and the distinctly visible women with tattooed chins and velveteen gowns from the Jordanian border; gnomes in shawls, scowling Bedouins, and students, and mullahs with long beards, and young girls in blue jeans and hectoring touts in baseball hats.

In one corner of the walled city was the house of Ananias, who in Acts 9: 1–20 had a vision which commanded him to go to the house of Judas to receive Paul.

“Original house,” said a caretaker.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps this was Straight Street. But I was dubious. It was true that this was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, but it had also been besieged and wrecked and pillaged and burned at various times. The shops in the souk, which was larger than Aleppo’s, and better lighted and airier, sold brassware and tiles, inlaid boxes and furniture, rugs, beads, huge swords, bad carvings, knickknacks, and Roman glassware.

“Original glass,” the hawkers said.

They were small mud-encrusted perfume bottles which had recently — so these stories went — been excavated. There were small terra-cotta figures, too, and pint-sized amphorae. For just a few dollars I could be the owner of a priceless collection of Roman artifacts.

The head of John the Baptist is said to have been interred at the Omayyad Mosque. Anyway, there is a shrine to it in the interior of the mosque, which lies at one end of the covered bazaar. I walked there and saw a group of Iranian pilgrims squatting on the carpeted floor, all of them sobbing, as they were harangued by a blubbing mullah doing a good imitation of an American TV evangelist in a mea culpa mode, yelling, preaching, weeping, blowing his nose, wiping his eyes, while his flock honked like geese in their grief.

Looking on were incredulous Syrians, secretly mocking, smiling at the exhibitionism and looking generally unsympathetic.

“Are you religious?” I asked an Arab in the mosque.

“Not at all,” he said. He had come to look at the renovation of the mosaics and pillars in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a horrible job the workmen were doing, he said — an act of vandalism, they were defacing it.

“What is that man saying?” I asked, indicating the howling sobbing mullah. He was standing, stuttering and speechifying, and at his feet, the sixty or more people sat with tearstained faces, their shoulders shaking.

“He is telling the story of Hussein.”

Hussein, Ali’s son, was the grandson of Mohammed, and was beheaded in the year 680 by an army of the Omayyad caliphate at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq. It was a violent and dramatic story which involved Hussein witnessing the slaughter of his wife and children, surrounded by a hostile army, besieged, urging his horse onward, and at last apologizing to his horse as — helpless — Hussein is decapitated.

“And those sweet lips, that the Prophet himself kissed — peace and blessings be upon him! — were then brutally kicked by the soldiers—”

A great shout went up from the passionate pilgrims, and a tiny Smurf-like woman shrouded in black handed a wodge of tissues to the mullah. He blew his nose and continued.

“They kicked Hussein’s head like a football—!”

“Waaaa!”

What startled me was the immediacy and power of the grief. It was more than pious people having a good cathartic cry. It was like a rehearsal for something more — great anger and bitterness and resentment, as though they had been harmed and were nerving themselves to exact revenge. The howls of their grieving Muslims had the snarl of a war cry.

Assad was a dismal individual but, impartially intolerant, at least he could claim credit for keeping religious fanaticism in check. He had persecuted the religious extremists with the same grim brutality he had used in suppressing political dissent. It was perhaps his only real achievement, but he was characteristically ruthless, which was why the massacre at Hamah claimed so many lives. That was the trouble with dictators: they never knew when to stop.

This subject came up at lunch the next day with some Syrians I had been introduced to. It was one of those midday meals of ten dishes — stuffed vegetables, salad, kebabs, hummus, filled bread, olives, nuts and dumplings — that lasted from one until four and broke the Syrian day in half. But one of the pleasures of Syria was its cuisine, and the simplest was among the best. Each morning in Damascus I left my hotel, walked three blocks and bought a large glass of freshly made carrot juice — twenty carrots, fifty cents.

“Oh, yes, this is definitely a totalitarian state,” one man said. “But also people here are civilized. We are able to live our lives.”

How was this so?

“I cannot explain why,” another said. “There is no logic in it that you as a Westerner can see. But in the Arab world such contradictions are able to exist.”

“We allow for them,” the first man said. “It is very strange. Perhaps you would not be happy here.”

“Are you ever afraid?” I asked.

“There are many police, many secret police. People are very afraid of them.”

“Do people discuss Assad?”

“No one talks about him. They do not say his name.”

I said, “So what we’re doing now — this conversation — it’s not good, is it?”

They all smiled and agreed. No, it was not a good idea. And, really, in a totalitarian state there is nothing to talk about except the obvious political impasse.

“Do you think I should go to Beirut?” I asked.

“You know the Israelis are shelling the south?”

“How would that affect me?”

“Many of the fundamentalists have retreated to Beirut. They associate Israel with America — after all, America allows this to happen. They might accuse you of being a spy. It is not a good time.”

“What would they do to me?”

“Kidnap or—” The man hesitated.

“Shoot me?”

Out of delicacy, they were not explicit, but I had the distinct feeling they were saying, “Don’t go.” They lived in Syria. They visited Beirut all the time — it was such a short distance to travel, no more than sixty miles, and of course the border formalities.

“The last time I was in Beirut — just a few days ago,” one of them said, “Israeli jet planes were flying over the city, buzzing the rooftops, intimidating people, breaking the sound barrier — and windows.”

I was losing my resolve. That made me linger in Damascus. One of the happiest experiences I had in Damascus was at the house of a man named Omer, the friend of a friend. Omer was a Sudanese cement expert who worked for the Arab Development Corporation. He lived with his attractive Sudanese wife and three children in an apartment block about a mile from the center of Damascus.

We were drinking tea and eating sticky buns when he summoned his eight-year-old son, Ibrahim, to meet me. The boy did not speak English. He was tall for his age, wearing rumpled blue buttoned-up pajamas. He looked solemn, he said nothing, he stood and bowed slightly to show respect.

Then, without a word, he went to a piano in the corner, and sat, and played “Theme With Variations” by Mozart. It was plangent and complex, and sitting upright on the stool, the boy played on, without a duff note. In that small cluttered apartment I experienced a distinct epiphany, feeling — with Nietzsche — that “without music life would be an error.”

The fighting in southern Lebanon and the strafing of Beirut made me reconsider my jaunt along the Lebanese coast. I called the American Embassy in Damascus and asked for information. By way of response I received an invitation to a recital at the ambassador’s residence. On this particular Arabian night, the performance was given by a visiting American band, Mingo Saldivar and His Three Tremendous Swords. Saldivar, “The Dancing Cowboy,” played an accordion, Cajun and Zydeco music, jolly syncopated country-and-western polkas. At first the invited guests — about a hundred Syrians — were startled. Then they were amused. Finally they were clapping.

Afterwards, I found the ambassador talking animatedly in Arabic to a tall patrician-looking Syrian. I introduced myself and asked my question.

“Don’t go to Beirut,” the ambassador replied. “Not now. Not with your face. Not with your passport.”

The American Ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, is a highly regarded career diplomat, and an amiable and witty man. He is also a subtle negotiator in the delicate peace talks involving Israel and Syria. The sticking point was the Golan Heights. This large section of eastern Syria was captured by the Israelis in 1967 and has been occupied by them ever since — and partly settled — something that quite rightly maddens the Syrians. In this connection, Ambassador Ross saw a great deal of President Assad, had been to Assad’s bunker and would have been a fund of information for me, except that he skillfully deflected all my intrusive questions.

“I think the ambassador is right — stay away from Lebanon at the moment,” the tall man said. He was Sadik Al-Azm, from an ancient Damascene family. His professorial appearance — tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses — was justified, for he was a professor at Damascus University. He was noted as the author of an outspoken defense of Salman Rushdie.

“That seems rather a risky thing to have done in a Muslim country,” I said.

“What do I care?” he said, and laughed out loud. “This is a republic, anyway. Even our president defended Rushdie!”

“It doesn’t worry you that Syria is crawling with Iranian fundamentalists?”

“What do they know?”

“They know there’s a fatwa, they idolize Khomeini,” I said. “It seems to me they’d like to stick a knife in your guts.”

“The Iranians you see here haven’t read anything,” Professor Al-Azm said. “They haven’t read what I wrote about Rushdie, and they certainly haven’t read The Satanic Verses. I’m not worried. In fact, I am updating my book at the moment for a new edition.”

“Fearless, you see?” Ambassador Ross said.

“What do I care?” the professor said.

“I think this phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is misleading,” the ambassador said. “I call it ‘political Islam.’ ”

He went on to say that he felt it was related to many other movements that in my opinion were now actively obnoxious in the world — the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, the Pro-Life assassins, and so forth. The militant moralizers in the United States who represented a new Puritanism were ideologically similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Party of God. Ambassador Ross did not say so, but it was logical to conclude from this that the Reverend Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah had a great deal in common.

In Syria and elsewhere, unexpectedly, political Islam was growing. More people — many of them young — wore veils, fasted at Ramadan.

This severely orthodox reaction had something to do with the waywardness of governments and the crookedness of politicians. Instead of working within the system, people were adopting a religious scourge, which was a simpler remedy involving denunciation and murder. It was perhaps understandable, but I found it depressing.

I wandered away while the ambassador was challenging Professor Al-Azm on another recondite matter, and I fell into conversation with a Syrian, Mr. Hamidullah. After a while I asked him about the cult of Basil.

“Father-President groomed him for leadership,” Mr. Hamidullah said.

“Isn’t an election usually a more reliable way to pick a leader?” I asked.

“In your country, maybe. But Syria is much different. Here it is necessary to have a golden formula to govern.”

“I see,” I said. Golden formula? I said, “And President Assad has the golden formula.”

“I call it the Secret Key,” Mr. Hamidullah said. “Without it, Syria cannot be governed. Father-President was passing this on to his son. He knew that when he died the next leader would need to have the Secret Key.”

“And this Secret Key is necessary because—”

“Because this country is so difficult!” he said. “We have Druses, Alawites, Christians, Jews, Shiites, Assyrians. We have Kurds, we have Maronites. More! We have Yazidis — they are devil worshipers, their God of Bad is a peacock. We have — what? — Chaldeans! How to govern all of them? Secret Key!”

He grinned at me, having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the Hafez Assad dictatorship was necessary and that, in the absence of Basil, his second son, Bashar, would be the possessor of the golden formula, the Secret Police — sorry, Mr. Hamidullah! I meant to say the Secret Key.

On my way to Ma’aloula, a village in the mountains north of Damascus, I saw picked out on a hillside in white boulders a motto in Arabic.

“What does that say?”

“ ‘Hail to Our Glorious Leader.’ Meaning Assad,” said Abdelrahman Munif, and shrugged and puffed his pipe.

Munif is the author of a dozen novels. His Cities of Salt trilogy—Cities of Salt, The Trench, and Variations on Night and Day—had been translated into English, to great praise, by my younger brother, Peter Theroux, who suggested I meet Munif when I passed through Damascus. Munif showed me a limited edition of the first book. It was a deluxe large format with loose pages, boxed, with signed and numbered wood block prints by a famous artist, Dia al-Azzawi. I marveled at the prints. Munif smiled. Yes, he said — he had recently finished writing a volume of art criticism — they were very good.

He was born in Amman of a mixed Saudi-Iraqi parentage, and was raised in Saudi Arabia. Vocally out of sympathy with the Saudi leadership, who have banned his books and revoked his citizenship, Munif has lived in many places in the Middle East — as well as Paris — in his sixty-odd years and has held eight different passports-of-convenience, including Yemeni and Omani. Munif is an exile of a sort that hardly exists anymore in the Western world but is fairly common — at least as far as intellectuals are concerned — in the Middle East. He is essentially stateless, but remains unbending. In his last communication with the Saudi government he was told that he could have his citizenship back but he had to promise to stop writing and publishing.

“No conditions. I will not accept a passport with conditions,” Munif said, and that was the end of the discussion.

I liked him from the first. He was laconic, kindly, generous, hospitable. If there was anything I wished to see or do, he was at my disposal. Was there anything I wanted to buy? I had no desire to buy anything, I said. Did I wish him to drive me to Beirut? I said I had been told it might be dangerous. But what suggestions did he have?

“Ma’aloula,” he said. “Saydnaya. These are lovely and very historic places you should see before you leave Syria.”

One of the curious features of Ma’aloula was that Aramaic was still spoken there by three-quarters of the population, who are Christians. Jesus spoke Aramaic. When he said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” it was in Aramaic. When he said, “God is love,” it was in Aramaic. In the Bible, Jesus’ cry on the cross, “Eloi Eloi, lama sabacthani,” is Aramaic.

It was hard to find a person in Ma’aloula who spoke English, but Father Faez Freijate spoke it well. He was a plump cheery soul with tiny eyes and a white tufty beard and side-whiskers, like a comical old Chaucerian friar. He wore a brown robe and carried a staff. His face was pink-cheeked and English-looking, but he roared with laughter when I mentioned that to him. “I am Arab and my family is Arab for three thousand years!” He was from Hauran, in south Syria, and was the pastor of the Ma’aloula church of St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, soldiers in the Roman army who had been martyred in A.D. 300. The church was built in 320.

“Do you speak Aramaic?” I asked.

“Yes, listen. Abounah—” He clasped his hands and began muttering very fast. At the end he blessed himself with the sign of the cross and said, “That was the Lord’s Prayer.”

“How do you say, ‘God is love,’ in Aramaic?”

“I do not know.”

I wanted very much to hear Christ’s words as they were originally spoken. I said, “How about, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at her.’ ”

“I do not know.”

“‘I am the light of the world.’ ”

“I just know a few prayers. Ask someone in town,” Father Freijate said with an air of exasperation. Then he said, “Have you seen the altar?”

Small and horseshoe-shaped, it looked like a shallow sink from which the drain has been omitted. It was the proudest ornament of the church, though it looked to me unprepossessing, until the priest explained it.

It was made of marble that had been quarried in Antioch. Its design had been adapted from the pagan altars of the animistic desert faiths — worshipers of bulls and cats and snakes. Such altars had been used for animal sacrifices, which was why their sides were necessary; and the pagan altars had a hole in the center for draining away the animal’s blood. This altar was made before the year 325, Father Freijate said, because that was the year that the Council of Nicea said that all altars had to be flat. It was unique. There was not another one to be seen anywhere else in Christendom.

“Why are there so many caves in Ma’aloula, Father?” All over the mountainside and in the passages and corners of the cliffs there were carved holes and shelves and caverns.

“The peoples were troglodeeties!”

“They lived in them?”

“Yes! And they had necropoleese and antik toombis!” He laughed at my ignorance and hurried away to help another visitor.

We went to Saydnaya. Saydnaya had two sides. One was a political prison, the other a church and convent. The prison, another bunker, was built on a hill but was mostly underground and surrounded by three perimeter fences of barbed wire. It had watchtowers but it hardly needed them, for the prison was absolutely escape-proof, but more than that, its dampness and its windowless cells shortened the prisoners’ lives by causing pneumonia and arthritis. There were said to be thousands of political prisoners at Saydnaya. A Syrian political prisoner was simply an enemy of Assad — sorry, Friend Assad.

The cathedral of Saydnaya was some distance from the prison, at the top of the hillside village. It was a happier place. It contained a convent and an orphanage — smiling nuns doing laundry, yelling children scampering in the back precincts. The nuns dressed like Muslim women in black draped gowns and black headdresses.

The history of the church was given in a set of old paintings, which could be read like a strip cartoon. A malik — king — out hunting, saw a gazelle. He drew his bow, but before he could shoot it, the creature turned into the Virgin. The king prayed. Afterwards, the king won a great battle. He returned to the spot where he had seen the Virgin and built this church.

I was about to enter a chapel when a friendly but firm little man insisted I take my shoes off. Surely that was done in mosques and temples but not in Christian churches? No, he said, I should read Exodus 3:5, the injunction “Put off thy shoes.”

This was Mr. Nicholas Fakouri, from Beirut, who had come with his wife, Rose, to bring a sacrifice.

“What sort of sacrifice?”

“A sheep.”

Munif’s daughter Azza translated my specific questions. The Fakouris had come by road from Beirut and had stopped in the bazaar in Damascus and bought a hundred-pound sheep for the equivalent of about ninety dollars. They had taken it here and presented it to the nuns at the church.

“They will kill it and eat it at Easter.”

“That is a present, not a sacrifice.”

“It is a sacrifice,” he insisted, using the Arabic word.

Rose Fakouri said, “I was very sick. I prayed to the Virgin. When I got better, I came here with my husband to give thanks.”

Driving out of Saydnaya, we passed the prison again, and I imagined all the men in those dungeons who had been locked up for their beliefs. Munif said that they allowed some of them out, but only after they had been physically wrecked by their imprisonment. He said, “They are sick, they are finished, they are ready to die.”

“Writing is difficult in a police state.”

He laughed and shouted, “Living is difficult!”

We returned to Damascus. He asked me to wait while he removed something from the trunk of his car. It was a large flat parcel, one of the limited-edition prints that I had admired in his apartment the first day we had met.

Standing at the juice stall, drinking my last glass of Damascus carrot juice, I realized that I liked this dusty, lively, rotting, uncertain, lovely-ugly place, and that I was sorry to leave, especially sorry that I was not heading the sixty miles to Beirut, but instead through the desert, the back way, through Jordan to Israel again. That was my fallback position — a ship that was leaving Haifa in a few days. Like a surrealistic farewell, a bus went by while I sipped the carrot juice, and on its side was lettered HAPPY JERNY!