and then our exile

--after nearly ten years of impatient waiting, I faced the Krak des Chevaliers through my own eyes. Haunting, as the mist fell and then the rain picked up--a massive Crusader castle, the stuff of legend, and centuries ago the Hospitallers rode to the wars through its gates with a flourish of trumpets and the jingle of harness, vanguard of militant Christianity. The mist became impenetrable, a wall of white; the rain angry, soaked us through our jackets and shoes. Huge ramparts, great stone passageways. Drying off on the way back to Homs.

--a dusk bus to Lattakia, heralded in a tourist-book as “one city in Syria where the markets are dominated by man-hunting, scandalously-clad women”. The city itself did not hold anything particular for me, many people I passed on the street did not say wa ‘alaikumussalam even though it was wajib for them to do so. It was more green than Damascus, the people had not lost their humanity as they have in the West, and it held the sea, a great sea, and so I will not censure it. What a sea!

--to the Qal’ah SalahudDin, to perhaps the most glorious morning of all my months here yet: with two people I love near to most in the world, through countryside which was so far removed from the harsh beauty of the southern provinces, the cell-walls of the city--I forgot all speech but superlatives in the freshness and magnificent beauty of the day: orange orchards heavy with fruit that went on and on, rolling hills lush in the dark green of chlorophyll brought to full fruition, the alternating leaves and colours of the world--great, sheer cliffs, wooded mountains, crumbling rock, sharp slopes of pine and oak, birds and farms and chipmunks and donkeys and now Muntaka will say I am typing like a fruit. But these are things one cannot give words for, these are things only photographs or personalities can impart: situated at the top of an incredibly steep mountain, the castle is intensely forceful in the way it captures your emotion, the cliffs and forests around and the terrible and beautiful clouds above.

--Aleppo was alright.

--called the adhan in the chapelmosque of Krak de Horsemen, in the musalla at Saladin’s Keep, in Aleppo’s citadel. The sound echoing, turning, rising through the arches and domes for perhaps the first time in centuries.

--did not like Tartous at all. The end.