Thubron - 1967;2017;

For my Mother and Father

IT IS FIFTY years since I was last in Damascus, staying with an Arab family in the citys heart to write this book. It seemed a quiet, almost provincial city then, its population a mere 650,000, surrounded by orchards where the villages stood in low clusters lanced by an occasional minaret.

I look down from Mount Kassioun now, as I did half a century ago, and see beneath me a metropolis transfigured: a population risen to four million, swollen by rural immigrants and wartime refugees. Where once I glimpsed outlying hamlets, the city now flows seamlessly to the horizon in a flood of flat roofs, domes and high-rise tenements, while the mountain itself, which I once crossed over rocks and thistles to the mythical house of Abraham, is built up even to its cliff face.

Damascus has been transformed not only by a war that still rages, but by the crises that have afflicted the Middle East during the last half century: the conflicts with Israel, the eclipse of war-torn Beirut (which accelerated the Syrian capitals rise), the impact of the Arab Spring. Glimpsed from where I stand on this mountain, the city looks unified. But a bitter divide runs invisibly from the eastern zone of Djobar up the Kassioun slopes to Barzeh. To its east, anti-government rebels are entrenched in suburbs reduced almost to rubble. To the west, the heart of the modern metropolis and its walled Old City remain in the hands of the regime. Almost out of sight the industrial satellite of Qaboun is another rebel stronghold. Blurred by distance, too, are the tragic purlieus of the Ghuta, the ancient orchard region where chemical attacks in 2013 left hundreds dead.

This is a city at war. But as I descend, the streets around me clog with the traffic of day-to-day business. The new metropolis has subsumed the old. An entrepreneurial middle class has long ago left their courtyard houses within the walls where I remember them and has populated the nondescript flat-blocks that have multiplied outside.

It is only as I enter the vaulted bazaars within the ramparts that memories intensify. This kernel of alleys, markets, mosques and churches, which may constitute the oldest inhabited city in the world, has escaped the devastation visited on its sister-city of Aleppo. The stone-built Suq Hamidieh still holds the massed tide of shoppers that I remember, and an ethnic mix of untraceable antiquity has produced a people of every complexion: green or blue eyes sometimes, ginger hair. When I enter the labyrinthine lanes in the Christian quarter where I lived, I come upon boutique hotels and restaurants the fruit of a prosperity I never witnessed but empty now, and dark.

Every night the regimes artillery opens up on the rebel suburbs a mile away from my hotel, faintly shaking the walls, and once or twice a week a few mortar shells fly the other way. There is no respite. In the coming days I see only two other foreigners, and sometimes I feel returned to how I felt half a century ago: alone in a city that was mine to discover.

But of course it was not my city. For a few euphoric months it seduced an obsessive and fascinated young man, and the book you are reading was written with the passion of first love: my first true travel book, my first exile from my own culture, my first immersion in a world I did not understand. Hence, perhaps, the books sense of fresh discovery, its delight in unfamiliar history, and the youthful excesses that occasionally make me blush now.

The buildings I loved are still intact. The mosaics of the Great Ommayad Mosque survive to mesmerise a future generation. The sultan Saladin sleeps undisturbed in his tomb, and the domed mausoleum of his warrior son el-Adil, hit by a mortar shell, did not collapse. The National Museum has cleared its shelves of artefacts for safe-keeping, yet they will return.

But it is easier to restore a peoples buildings than their psyche. The Damascenes that I remember were more open and inquisitive than those I encounter now. Fifty years ago I could not walk down a street without being regaled by invitations to drink coffee. But now it is as if a great lamp has been turned down. Nobody cries out to me. In part this is the result of a mass tourism that has come and gone since I left. But after six years of war, the citizens less often meet my gaze. They have become private, weary, sometimes angry.

This war will go on for ten years, or for ever, they say. Look at Libya, look at Iraq Our economy is dead A kilo of tomatoes used to cost forty Syrian pounds, now its seven hundred And how did you come to be here? There are no Westerners any more The government finds new ways to tax us, but our salaries stay the same Syria is bleeding

But when I encounter anyone more closely, an old remembered sweetness emerges, like the residue from centuries of civilisation. People simply want an end to suffering. They are very tired. Everyone has a tale to tell of how mortar fire has wrecked a home or killed a child. If Damascenes support their brutally repressive regime, it is because the rebel alternative louring outside the walls would be harsher still. It is a regime that unites its minorities in nervous coalition. The government of Bashar al-Assad is dominated by the Shia sect of Alawites, and the Shia are now more visible in this Sunni city. Their shrines, once little visited, are frequented by Iranian and Iraqi pilgrims. Other minorities especially the Christians (who number 10 per cent) fear what might become of them under extremist rebel occupation.

There is no escaping the presence of war. There are road-blocks and sentry posts at every other street crossing, manned by soldiers toting assault rifles or sipping little cups of tea, cement-filled drums piled into barricades, streets throttled by razor wire. And the unseen presence of the Mukhabarat intelligence service adds another layer of fear.