The End of the Adventure

I arrived at the airport and found myself with a couple of hours to kill. So, I mused, the end of the Great Levant Adventure, Part II and I’ve survived (part I was 2 months of travel in Egypt, Israel/Palestine and Jordan in 1996 but that’s another story). I felt good, sitting by myself in the departure lounge. Empowered. I remembered how I had been rather fearful upon arrival in Beirut and on my first daytrip to Saida but how it had become rapidly easier from then on. My fondest memories were of Damascus, easily the highlight for me. My experiences there will remain to guide my future path. Damascus is reality, Damascus is the world as it really is, the Divine as close as we can get in this existence. I will always treasure it.

I felt glad that I’d travelled alone – only that way was I able to experience what I did.

Byblos

Byblos (Jbail or, its older name, Gebel) is a charming and unnervingly pristine town for anyone who’s just come from Syria. The drive down the coast was also enlightening – miles and miles of tent-camps on either side of the road, housing refugees either political or economic. Probably mostly economic. Syrians seem to lose their charm and humanity when they come into contact with rich Lebanon.

That evening, I went to Pépé’s “Byblos Fishing Club”, which has played host to every imaginable celebrity over the decades since Pépé (originally from Mexico) first moved to Lebanon. I ate dinner alone, including some fine red wine, Cuvée Reserve from the Bakaa Valley – strong but light with a mead-like, honey quality. I finished it off with a coffee and as I was waiting for the bill, the younger woman on the other table of three (they had arrived perhaps 15 minutes earlier) came over and invited me, on behalf of her mother, to join them, which I promptly did. Zena, her mother Mona and their friend Thierry from Geneva had been speaking French but switched mostly to English to accommodate me. Mona and Zena were Maronites from Jbail/Byblos, very wealthy no doubt, and full of warmth and openness. Thierry too. It goes to show that one can be rich and good! Mona lost her husband and her son (a genius she said) – I didn’t ask how but one must not wonder too long in this place. Zena, 40, looked 30, studying education in Joumeih but has never worked. Thierry a masseur – saved Mona’s legs once in Geneva! Just here for 24 hours to visit his friends. Byblos/Jbail is the St.Tropez or Portofino of “Liban”. And this is the Middle East as well – gentile, wealthy, quiet. Walking down to the tiny harbour for dinner, I was met by the sickly-sweet perfume of mandarins rotting under the trees, of clematis flowers and frangipani. Beirut lies within view just across the water and looks much more New World, American than European. Pépé greeted us personally as we sat chatting – he must be well over 80. On the walls were photos of him with all of the beautiful people. Especially prominent were the Miss Europe 2002 photos – the contestants must have been billeted here. I suppose Miss Israel would’ve been asked politely to stay at home in “occupied Palestine” thank you. I felt distinctly underdressed for most of the evening – a roughneck traveller, just blown in from the desert, the wild frontier further east. Zena had never been to Syria – only once to Arwed island near Tartus on a private yacht.

The next morning, I sat alone on the terrace of the Abi-Chmou restaurant run by the owner of the room I had found to stay in. There was a mass being held in the tiny “Our Lady of the Gate” church opposite. Lovely chants in unison, lead by the priest, wafted across to me. Other than that there was nothing stirring in the old town except for the distant sound of traffic from the motorway to Beirut. It was warm enough that I felt no chill even in a sleeveless t-shirt and shorts.

I spent the day wandering the ruins of old Gebel, alone and with time to take in everything around me. I sat for a long time in the tiny Roman theatre, thinking that a performance there would have been very intimate. In contrast to the previous few days, it was nice to have a day free of travel. I sat looking at the worn stones of the amphitheatre, the Middle Eastern sun warming my back, the sea stretching out before me into the endless West, the breeze ruffling the thorn trees. Looking out to sea, especially in a place as ancient as old Gebel, inevitably encourages one to consider questions of meaning and purpose. Is this what the rest of my life will consist of? I asked myself. Travelling alone to all sorts of exotic places, taking a few photos, scribbling a few words, gazing at the horizon and asking myself what it all means? Perhaps – and there would be nothing wrong with that, it just feels rather lonely thinking of it. But what would I rather have? Companionship? Not always and certainly not just for the sake of not being alone. Tintin comics, Al Stewart lyrics and a myriad other romantic influences – that’s what shaped me as a child and as a teen and gave me an unquenchable desire to strike out, explore the world, have adventures.

I walked later through a cypress grove, fragrant, alongside the wall of a Bronze Age temple (2300 BCE). What did the Bronze Age people of Gebel believe? How did they attempt to come to grips with their mortality? What belief systems did they develop to attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible? Eternal life and reincarnation are both just limited attempts to understand and explain something beyond our grasp. The basic convictions, that we surely cannot cease to exist entirely and that we are all somehow connected, seem to be shared by all humanity.

Fossils in the rocks made a mockery of the human history built from them. The wind-whipped waves continued breaking on the rocks below. Dark clouds started gathering across the sea to the West.

The 4300 year old temple was dedicated to our old friend of the outstretched wings, Baal.

I spent some time that evening sitting in the kitchen of the restaurant chatting to the maid Linda. 58, widowed 16 years ago by the “troubles”, 3 sons, 3 chickens, a rooster and a small dog in the mountains behind Byblos in Bchelé. She asked me for help at one stage for her son who was in need of medical treatment so I gave her LL3000 ($2). What if she was lying? What if her son wasn’t sick? What if she didn’t have a son? What if she actually earned three times the $200 a month she claimed? It was all irrelevant: I am by her standards (and those of most of the world’s population), exceedingly rich. She is, in comparison to me, exceedingly poor. Giving her something is a flow of money in what I consider to be the right direction. A Saudi man last night gave her LL40’000: a Muslim, she said. The Muslims here look after each other, she continued. She is a Maronite, but so is the tight-fisted owner of the restaurant and guest rooms. I paid $40 for a tiny room with no hot water, plus $10 for a meagre breakfast that Linda in part supplied with fresh eggs from her chickens. The Christians just look out for themselves she said. She had asked a few people here for help but they all found excuses – just paid the bills, why didn’t you ask sooner, etc. etc. Having wealth makes me uncomfortable – I am often possessed by an urge to divest myself of it. None of my heroes were wealthy.

Before I left the following morning, I gave Linda $50 – a small amount for me but enough for her to pay for the medical treatment for her son. She was of course very touched by my gift and told me to come and stay with her family next time I was in Lebanon. I will, if I return one day.

Blood Brothers

The next morning I rose early and walked the 20 minutes or so over to the ruins. I was blessedly alone for an hour, not another soul in sight. It was cloudy and the sun only broke through occasionally. I left later on the bus which conveniently stopped in front of the hotel to pick me up.

Upon boarding the bus I was confronted by three beaming faces. Abdul, Mohammed and Ahmed said they were on their way to Beirut and were ecstatic to have me as their travelling companion. We had an hilarious time “conversing” with “ma bif ham” – “I don’t understand” becoming a favourite way for one of them to get me to tell one of his mates to pee off. The desert rolled by outside, punctuated by an occasional Bedouin alighting in the middle of nowhere (although, on close inspection a tent could always be found nearby). The banter became a bit tedious towards the end when a younger guy joined us from the back of the bus and wanted to fly back to “Suisa” with me or at least to have my address. The lads all disembarked in Homs so who knows if they were really continuing to Beirut. If they did so, they would no doubt be treated with disdain by their wealthy neighbours there. The whole bus was full of people (almost all men) from the town of Shakna, a little further up the road from Palmyra. Looking back at them, I was met with a sea of red-turbaned, sun-tanned faces, observing me with gentle curiosity. The boys also knew the English word “donkey” and for a while used it on each other to great effect.

In Homs I was shuttled efficiently into a taxi (for which I paid £200, about $2) that took me straight to the greatest of all Crusader castles, Crac des Chevaliers, known to the locals as Qa’alat Hosn. Before I’d been there too long the place was stormed by German and Japanese tourist-troops in a bizarre Axis-alliance world-domination re-enactment. I resorted to guerrilla tactics in order to avoid them – hiding out in various obscure parts of the castle until the various heavily armed (with photographic equipment) platoons had passed by. In spite of all this, the place truly moved me. Especially the attention to detail that was evident – such as the delicate gothic touches in the Knights’ Hall and in a cupola halfway up one of the towers. In the latter, tiny flowers were carved into the stone around the architrave. A little piece of western Europe, so far from home. There was a young boy wandering from room to room in the castle, singing haunting Arabic songs in some of the acoustically perfect rooms (such as the chapel). Outside the castle again, I walked up the road further to get a view of the citadel as a whole. There was something about the place, I can not despise the foolish men who built it, in the end they are my brothers somehow, however misguided they seem when looked back on by us smug 21st century know-it-alls.

I caught a minibus back down to the main road after refusing to pay £600 for a taxi to Tartus (4 times the going rate). On the way down I noticed a church in Hosn village (if it sounds like you’ve a cleft palate whilst saying that one, you’re pronouncing it correctly) and tried to imagine what the many local Christians thought when their “brothers” from the West arrived 900 years ago to liberate them. I don’t suppose they thought much because they were killed indiscriminately, along with everyone else, regardless of race or creed. But no doubt the church or its predecessor was there in the village before the Crusaders came, whilst they ruled from their stone citadel and after they were given safe passage and left, never to be seen again. I was dropped on the side of the highway at the bottom of the hill and spent about 20 minutes trying to hitch a ride to the coast. It’s during moments like that, that I often become aware of what I’m doing, i.e. standing alone in the middle of nowhere on a highway in Syria for goodness sake, trying unsuccessfully to flag down a taxi, bus, anything. No doubt I provided an exotic spectacle for the locals. I finally got a lift in an “unmarked taxi” into the city of Tartus, which sits on the Mediterranean, and somehow found my way into the centre of town and stumbled upon a reasonable looking guest house. Mission accomplished!

I wandered a little later up to “Our Lady of Tortosa”, another Crusader construction which is best described as a pseudo-church-cum-fortress. It was simply wonderful inside and out and in contrast to Crac, I was completely alone here, except for the rays of late afternoon sunlight slanting in through the narrow, high windows. I had the same feeling as I had had in Crac: somehow there is a light still shining somewhere in these places. At least in part, some of those men were driven by higher ideals. But even the best of people can be seduced by the easy success that violence promises.

I left Our Lady and strolled through the littered, “Beirut”-looking streets of the old town and joined the many residents taking a walk along the beach before sunset. There were waves crashing on the sandy beach, unfortunately also strewn with rubbish, an all too common sight in the Middle East. The sun inched its way down towards the sea, casting its blinding light onto the water. Families were out walking on the beach, shoes remaining firmly on. To the south lay the mountains of Lebanon, snow-capped but blurred by haze.

So out of the west they came, the Salabi, with blood-red crosses on their chests. And they ruled this town for 180 years until they finally left, sailing no doubt from the island of Arwed, which sits guarding Tartus, into the blinding light of the west.

I was reminded of Sting’s song about his home city of Newcastle, an “edge-of-the-empire garrison town”:

they lived and they died and they prayed to their gods

but their stone gods did not make a sound

and the empire crumbled and all that was left were the stones the workmen found …

Men go crazy in congregations, they only get better one-by-one.

The next day was the most difficult day of travel I experienced on my trip. I went for a wander at about 7:30 down to the pier and considered a trip out to Arwed but in the end decided I’d rather get on the road. I walked again through the very compact old town back to my hotel. I checked out and headed to what I considered the “main” bus station but according to everyone I attempted to communicate with, there were no buses to Lebanon, just taxis. No one spoke any form of English. I got a local taxi to the main taxi area in town (which turned out to be about 400m away from the “main” bus station!) where they informed me it would cost $50 for a taxi to Beirut or $10 if shared with 4 others. I agreed to share and sat in the car for 45 minutes with no sign of anyone else turning up. A forlorn hope, surely. I don’t think any locals would travel to Lebanon in that way. To keep up the pretence, the driver shouted out “Beirut” occasionally but there was no one to hear him except the 10 other taxi drivers standing around chatting and smoking. Eventually I got talking to a guy who knew a bit of German – the prices got worse – $20 just to border, in a shared taxi. So I gave up and returned to the hotel. The girl working there, Rania, and another guy were shocked at the prices. They suggested I stay in Tartus. So I decided to try my luck by going to Lattikia (completely in the wrong direction but a more significant transport hub) but the guy suggested going back to Homs and catching a bus from there to Tripoli (in Lebanon). As a last resort I walked to the train station and realised as I approached that I’d found the right place. It was swarming with buses, minibuses and taxis. I found myself immediately on a minibus to the Al-Aarida border. I asked “how much” and suggested £100, thinking that would be lower than the going rate. The driver accepted very eagerly and as it turned out, everyone else only paid £10. But, I was more than happy. An attractive dark-eyed girl got on and sat next to me – after a while, she looked at me once or twice. Eventually I returned her gaze, she said “hello” and “welcome in Syria”. She asked me if she could help me. I said I needed to get to border but she misunderstood me and thought I had asked her to travel with me to the border. She was a little embarrassed and said, no, she was disembarking before then. But she spoke to the driver and told him I wanted to be taken to the border and she attempted to pay my fare. He, however, was not ready to give up his cash-cow quite so easily and in the end she had to give up. She got out a couple of minutes later and once again said “welcome in Syria”. What a lovely soul.

I arrived at the border and walked through, getting the appropriate array of stamps from a variety of offices situated along the way. I ended up at Lebanese customs where a border guard started chatting to me. He gave me a coffee and we yakked a bit about wives, marriage, children, divorce (it’s easy for Muslims, he said – she just left). I continued on a hundred metres or so and asked some loitering taxi drivers about the fare to Tripoli or Jbail (Byblos – where I was heading). Once again “ka-ching”, dollar signs in their eyes and $45 to Jbail, no, no “service” sharing possible. I walked back to the border guard and asked him what the best way was to continue travelling south – he was dismissive of the local people and instead organised a ride for me with a truck driver heading for Tripoli. It cost me nothing. He dropped me at the edge of town, I started walking in, a local taxi picked me up and took me to the bus station where I boarded a bus to Jbail and Beirut. LL1000 each for the taxi and the bus and nought for the truck ride = a grand total of $1.33, not $20, not $45, not $50. Just to make my day a little more interesting, the bus driver didn’t stop at Jbail and I ended up scrambling off a couple of kilometres further on after realising what had happened.

Paying too much doesn’t bother me because of the cost but because these people have ceased to relate to me as a human being. I have become an object of wealth, to be abused in any way. Trust no longer exists in the interaction and therefore everything becomes unpleasant. For example, the two guides I had in Palmyra. The first related to me as a human being, the second did not. On this day of travel, the hotel people, the girl on the minibus, the border guard, the truck driver, the taxi driver in Tripoli, the bus people, the falafel people I bought my lunch from – all of them were just great. The experience was only soured by the Tartus taxi drivers, the “cash-cow” minibus driver and the loitering taxi drivers at the border. All of these individuals did not hesitate to take advantage of my vulnerability. Travelling by oneself and being willing to be vulnerable inevitably draws out this contrasting response – it seems to amplify the good and the not-so-good in human interactions.

Of Empires and Occupiers

The next morning I once again caught a service taxi to Cola and was herded immediately onto a minibus bound for Baalbek, on the other side of the Mt. Lebanon range in the Bekaa Valley region of Lebanon. We scoured the streets for potential customers – Baalbek, shibi Baalbek shouted the tout from the passenger seat at everyone we passed. A old man sitting at a café, smoking a sheesha water pipe, looked up startled and waved us on. Two women crossing a side street shook their heads, soldiers on duty smiled no. But somehow we filled the van and set off into the mountains in what I was beginning to realise was typical Lebanese style – squealing tyres, on the wrong side of double yellow lines, speeding along at over 100 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, ignoring red lights. We passed through 4 or 5 checkpoints along the way, 2 of which were manned by Syrian soldiers. In and around Beirut there was no sign of the occupying power but once we had crossed the range they became much more visible.

I chose to stay at the Hotel Palmyra in Baalbek, once an opulent port of call for the rich and famous of another era. It has a faded charm today, hanging on to its former glories in the face of change, dank and silent and overwhelmingly empty. Baalbek was for centuries, spanning a number of different eras, a place of great religious significance. The ruins are colossal, monumental, impossible to capture with anything other than wide open eyes. I spent a day amongst them, the first few hours of which were alone. As the day progressed, groups of tourists joined me, many of them Middle Eastern. I sat for some time in the Temple of Bacchus watching people shuffle through, surrounded by its intricately carved walls. In a number of places were inscriptions in what looked like Arabic but I discovered later that they were actually in Turkish. Not until Ataturks reforms in the 1920s was the Latin script adopted for that language. The Germans excavated Baalbek in the 19th century – thanks to a contract with the Turks, the then overlords of this region. It took me some time to guess the language I was hearing one group of tourists speaking – the former imperial overlords now sending tourists to their lost domains. I wonder when Lebanon was last completely self-governing, not having to "cooperate" with some much more powerful nation. It seems this tiny scrap of land is simply too important to be left alone in peace.

A little later, a young man and his betrothed came in hand-in-hand, cuddling. She was wearing a silken scarf on her head. A friend took a photo of them sitting on the high altar.

The saying "a woman’s glory is her hair" can be confirmed in only a few minutes in Lebanon. even by many of those who wear some sort of head covering.

Another group walking amongst the ruins consisted of Arabs and Americans. It was nice to see and hear. One young woman, speaking only English, looked at me quickly as they entered the temple. She had long, silken black hair and dark eyes. I suppose she was part of the family that had emigrated and were returning now to their homeland for a visit. I was sitting, alone of course, in a corner, looking up and around at the walls, the delicate stucco work in the stone, the soaring columns. I caught her eye briefly but then looked away. When she returned from looking outside, she looked at me again, this time for much longer. I looked away again but caught her eye before doing so, just to let her know I’d noticed.

Now, every time I’ve ever followed up a spark like that, my hunch has turned out to be correct. Somehow though, I have no real desire to chase these things anymore. What’s the point? Unless there is a real, deeper connection, a woman can be as physically beautiful as she wants to be, I’d still never be happy together with her. And the only way to find that connection is by spending time together – something that cannot happen normally with a chance encounter, even if it’s in the Temple of Bacchus.

Later on, I sat opposite the 6 giant columns of Jupiter. A group of local lads came by and insisted on having their photos taken with me. Due to the altitude (about 1000m), it was noticeable cooler sitting there than what it had been on the coast in Beirut. To the north and west was the Mt. Lebanon range, behind me the Anti-Lebanon range and Syria. Outside of the walls of the ruins was a small cypress forest. For most of the afternoon, fireworks exploded on the streets of Baalbek. I couldn’t help thinking that some of the locals perhaps like exploding noises, whatever the cause may be. The main street of the town was ablaze with Hizbollah banners – the telephone pole outside my hotel window was shared by such a banner and some Christmas lights.

I ate that evening at the hotel, in the company of a mostly French tour group with a few Norwegians (speaking English) thrown in for good measure. I retired to my room afterwards and considered making a start on the Dostoyevsky I had brought with me but decided against it. Somehow I didn’t want to be distracted from where I was.

Cruising the Corniche

The taxi ride from the airport to my hotel gave me my first taste of what I was embarking on. We flew past the new national stadium, immaculate and empty and hurtled along the motorway into the city proper. In comparison to what I’d left a few hours before, everything looked on the point of collapse, covered in grime and dust, overwhelmed by waste and rubbish. The driving style of the taxi driver matched what I was seeing.

Night fell not long after I reached my hotel, a humble establishment a block behind the Corniche, Beirut’s famous esplanade, that curves its way along the Mediterranean coast on which the city perches. From my balcony I could hear the never-ending drone of traffic, overlaid by the muezzin’s call from a nearby mosque. Later on I heard church bells ringing. The tower of the American University not far away up the hill was floodlit against a clear blue-black sky. Firecrackers detonated repeatedly to celebrate the end of Ramadan, replacing the more sinister explosions that filled this city in the 80s and 90s. Arabic music blared from a lad’s car as he slowly cruised the Corniche, looking for action.

I made an early start the next morning and caught a “service” (i.e. shared) taxi to Cola Bus Station then an express bus south along the coast to the ancient Phoenician city of Sidon (Saida). I found the Crusader Sea-Castle after asking for directions from a kiosk owner. It wasn’t open at 8:30am, neither was the nearby citadel of Khan al-Franj. The gatekeeper was already there, however, and he and a loitering soldier wished to move an illegally parked car from directly in front of the entrance. “Monsieur?” they asked me hopefully. I helped them push it over to a legal area once the soldier had released the hand brake. In annoyance at this obvious breach of the law, he let down one of the car’s tyres. The gatekeeper, by way of thanks, let me into the castle early (at 9:05) and told me to buy a ticket on exit. At least, I assume that’s what he suggested, as I only understood the word “ticket”. I spent a couple of hours wandering around the ruins, joined only briefly by three local sightseers. The sun was hot, making the land hazy and blurring the sea’s horizon into the sky. The apprehension I had felt slowly began to ebb away as I acclimatised myself to the new barrage of sights, sounds and smells around me. But most of all, the encounters with people helped to relax me.

I climbed up onto the remaining part of the roof of the castle. 900 years ago, another European had stood there on that rampart, looking down on the small splashes of the waves on the seaweed covered rocks. And looked out to sea, into the west, towards the barbarous lands whence he had come. The scars from his sword still make this land bleed, weep. Ultimately though, all that most people here want, whatever their heritage or religious persuasion, is to be left alone to their mobile phones, their internet connections, their Hollywood blockbusters, to be fully-fledged members of a consumerist society.

So perhaps the crusades were a success after all …

After the castle I spent a couple of hours wandering around the old souqs. At one point I stumbled on a Greek Orthodox church, complete with congregation singing mass with their priest. The door was open onto the narrow alleyway so I sat and listened for a while. Later on I returned and wandered inside. There was a good collection of gold icons on sale in the foyer.

I caught a bus back to Beirut and got out at the Cola intersection. As I was trying to work out how to get into town, a man said something to me in German and even the standard greeting in Zurich dialect “Grüezi”. I ended up spending half the day with Ahmad, speaking German the whole time because he didn’t speak English or French. He’d lived in Oerlikon for a number of years (a northern suburb of Zurich) and had been married to a Swiss woman. He showed me a bullet wound in his hand and said he had been caught in the crossfire in a shootout whilst living in Switzerland. He’d been away from Lebanon for 20 years and had just returned. He didn’t have any scars to show me from Beirut. We drove around in his clean yellow Mercedes taxi. He took me through Sabra, the Palestinian part of town, then the Hizbollah controlled area complete with TV studios, army and a secure area for their leader Hassan to live in. I asked him what he thought about Hizbollah, what most Lebanese thought about them. He paused for a moment then said that Hizbollah is like a sleeping tiger – as long as you do not attack it, it remains beautiful and peaceful and will even allow itself to be stroked. But if you attack, it will defend itself.

He showed me a street in Sabra which he said had a street under it – the Israelis used it with help of certain Maronites when they invaded in the early 80s. Seeing these things first hand made the Israeli invasion real instead of just a theoretical television memory from 20 years ago. The inhabitants of Sabra are just normal people. Just like the normal people a few hundred kilometres from Beirut in Iraq. And just like the people of Baghdad today, they had to suffer whilst a war raged around them, stealing their loved ones from them, heaping untold misery and hardship upon them. And for what?

We continued on into the centre of town – in comparison to Sabra sterile, new and empty by day. The city centre of Beirut has been completely rebuilt since the cessation of hostilities and it really is very impressive – it has been done in a uniform style which is quite stately and monumental. Just on the edge of the city centre is a memorial which had been caught in the crossfire many times during the war but which has remained largely intact. A figure, pockmarked with bullet holes, is standing, straining, reaching his hand out towards the Christian hills behind the city, where there is a similar monument reaching down to the city. To one side of this monument, a small Orthodox church is being restored. And further down towards the harbour, a giant mosque is being built with foreign money for “all the people of the world”.

As we drove around Beirut, we saw two Hummers – Ahmad pointed and said “Saudis”. He made jokes and told stories about how rich they are. He also told stories about prostitutes working in Beirut, especially Russians, some who would always request him when they needed a taxi. Not once did he make a snide or degrading remark about them. He’s engaged again he said, to a local girl, a teacher. A good woman. His Swiss ex-wife had just wanted to go to Jamaica all the time for holidays.

We continued on to one of Beirut’s famous landmarks – Pigeon Rocks and had a coffee and a falafel. He dropped me in the Hamra district, from whence I walked back to my hotel near the Corniche. It seemed that half of Beirut was out on the Corniche that Sunday evening, still the day off in this once predominantly Christian country.

A matter of life and death

I had been to the Tonhalle that evening for Bach’s Mass in B-Minor and had sat for over two hours, letting the surging waves of divine perfection wash over me. Afterwards, I walked alone along the river into town, careful with every step in the snow. It had fallen the night before and covered everything, lending a muffled, indoor feel to the sound of my footsteps upon it. I continued on through the Old Botanic Gardens then across into Zurich’s Old Town and to the Café Zähringer.

I ordered a tea and sat, sipping it, still in the thrall of the music. It had evoked in me a deep longing. A door ajar and beyond it bright light, promise. A door ajar, leading to eternity. It seemed that every moment of my life was with me as I sat, pondering; past difficult to distinguish from present and imagined futures hovering like unborn memories. Life and death just two sides of the same page, both filled with illegible scribble. But when held up to the light, the two sides becoming indistinguishable, fusing to form a whole, finally making sense. It seemed to me too, at that moment, that my long deceased father was somehow with me. In the same way that my distant but very much living family accompany me even when I am away from them – through love. Love is that door left ajar, leading to eternity, to the divine.

On the table next to me two young proto-scientists, one Swiss, one German, pored over their books together, united in their quest for knowledge.

On the other side sat a pretty, young blonde, playing draughts with a male friend. It seemed I was the only person there by himself. I thought about my flight the following morning, my imminent baptism into a world profoundly foreign to the one I was sitting in. I couldn’t help feeling a bit apprehensive about it – perhaps this was amplifying my awareness of my own mortality. It’s easy to become too comfortable living in one of the wealthiest and safest countries in the world. The reactions of my friends when I told them I was planning a 9-day trip alone to Lebanon and Syria had done nothing to calm any sense of uncertainty. They ranged from disbelief to outright horror. But perhaps that said more about my friends than about the actual dangers facing me.

A draughts piece fell on the floor, I lent down, picked it up and handed it to her with a quiet smile.

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