âOne night, though, there was heavy gunfire along the street, between the Syrians here and the Falangists. I live just nearby but they were shooting ceaselessly late into the night, so I slept here on these stairs.' (Abdul Malik gestures towards a narrow stairwell that would be difficult enough to stand upon for any length of time, let alone rest on.)
In a country where until recently the religion you were born into could get you killed, Abdul Malik knows the secrets of survival. Hailing from the Chouf Mountains, a stronghold of the Druze sect, he has been content all these years working in majority-Muslim West Beirut to let his customers think he himself is a Druze, although his family background is actually Maronite Christian. But, he hastens to add, âI am not a partisan, I am a Lebanese.' And he's not a liar either, even if he is one of the world's most durable travel agents.
âThere is the conscience to please, and I am happy,' he says as I depart. âThe most important thing is to sleep well.'
DAY 301 (9 MARCH): JOUNIEH
Wear and tear on my chair is like hair falling out: the loss of wheel spokes is something one must expect over time. Happily, the remedy is simple: bicycle spokes are exactly the right length and any mechanic worth his salt can replace them. (It's remarkable, though, how often a cycle-shop assistant will tell me, âSorry, we don't fix wheelchairs.')
But will there be a helpful shop here in a town this size, where I haven't seen a single bike? No sooner have I posed the question than the answer appears, in the form of another wheelchair user leading a busy life. Roy Jaja, who runs an optical-goods shop in the heart of Jounieh's tourist quarter, is a reverse immigrant: brought up in Sydney, he returned to his parents' homeland a few years ago. âThe social atmosphere, being among your own people, nothing could replace that for me,' he explains.
âNo regrets?'
âNone really. I go back to Sydney now and again, and catch up with my old friends.'
Roy knows where to get wheelchair parts, spares, add-ons. Off we go to a service station where trusted hands replace my spokes. Roy and I meet as strangers, part as friends.
DAY 302 (10 MARCH): BYBLOS
Byblos is my Jericho. As I won't be getting to the world's oldest townâ which is about to be occupied by Ariel Sharon's troops in a drive to stop suicide attacks against Israelisâthis mere stripling of 7000 inhabited years will have to serve as a substitute. And it's quite an acceptable one, as Byblos (Book City) is the birthplace of the alphabet.
So what is there to see today? A Roman colonnade from the third century after Christ; a nymphaeum from the century before that; an obelisk-shaped temple from the second millennium BC; a typical local home from 2800 BC adjoined to a temple for the worship of Baal; and all in a grassed-over field in the shadow of a Crusader castle entered via an indestructible-looking keep.
DAY 303 (11 MARCH): CEDARS OF LEBANON
I travel by shared taxi to Bcharre, Kahlil Gibran's hometown. It's an oversight to come here on a Monday: the museum in his honour is closed. But at least, in this high country where the predominant element appears to be raw oxygen, I will see Nature's answer to Byblos. This is the only place, it is said, where you can see the cedars, these symbols of Lebanon that stood in biblical times. Some of the specimens are 1500 years old (a little young for the Bible, but the experience is invigorating).
DAY 304 (12 MARCH): BAALBEK
Nestling in the beautiful Beka'a Valley, Baalbek is famous for its World Heritage-listed ruins, but this is no motley collection of marble stumps: here are awesome full-scale temples (this one to Venus, that one to Jupiter) from the glory days of the Roman Empire.
DAY 305 (13 MARCH): TYRE
From Beirut it's a sunny, relaxed morning drive down the coast to south Lebanon. In Sidon the taxi picks up a second passenger, a young, unshaven university student heading home. To avoid politics makes sense in this part of the world, so I chit-chat about the historical ruins he has seen. But Hamid's mind is fixed on more recent times. Out of the blue he tells me, âMy brother chose the road of martyrdom. He exploded a bus in Jerusalem.' He awaits my reaction.
âCan you make peace this way?' I ask (privately wondering whether he thinks I'm an Israeli).
He looks out to sea, ignoring the irrelevance of the question, and adds, âI would do exactly the same.'
Like Byblos, Tyre was a Phoenician port, famous in King Solomon's day, but its modern history is every bit as riveting as the ancient stuff. Wheeling along the coastal road, I cannot help noticing the serried ranks of beach palms, systematically shot out (Hezbollah target practice?). Opposite the al-Mina excavations is a sign in red paint that reads, âAli H. killed by Zionist pigs, 27 April 1997'. Terror breeds terror.
At times like these, when the distant past is far more appealing than the present, there is no place like a hippodrome. Horseshoe-shaped, this stadium where second-century Romans held chariot races is so well preserved that footraces could be held there today (and, for all I know, are). I do a full circuit, a victory lap for the absent crowd.
DAY 308 (16 MARCH): TRIPOLI
Alternative name Trablusâand for me instantly troublous. Of all the halts on this journey, this triply famous one (not to be confused with its namesakes in Libya and Greece) is perhaps the least suitable for a wheelchair user.
If the Old City's charm belongs largely to centuries past, the same could be said of its hotels, all of which are up narrow flights of stairs. I find the best resting place close to the sea, in this case a 5-kilometre taxi ride to Tripoli's port. But here is the strange thing: the grand hotel overlooking the Mediterranean can find me a room only on the fourth floor. This means dismounting from my chair and bumming my way up all four levels, pausing on the landings to catch my breath.
The maître d' appears put out by this, although his assistant understands. Tired out from the quest for a room, I cling to this half empty hotel as if it were a life raft. Somehow the durable grand staircase, with its broad expanse of carpet, spells W-E-L-C-O-M-E whereas the rickety splintered boards of those dosshouses in the Old City screamed F-U-C-K O-F-F. The sight of someone shuffling down to breakfast on his posterior doesn't seem to disturb my fellow guests (though what they say in Arabic over their falafel sandwiches I can only imagine).
SYRIA REVISITED: 17-25 MARCH
DAY 312 (20 MARCH): KRAK DES CHEVALIERS
This castle's French name translates literally as Castle of the Knights (Qasr al-Hosn in Arabic), âthe finest castle in the world' according to Lawrence. Normally a castle, with its steep stone staircases, vaulted cellars, forbidding ramparts and lofty bastions, is the last place a wheelchair user would think of setting footplate, but today I am in luck. Some English backpackers whom I've met up with in Hama are happy to let me join them on their tour, and even volunteer to do the heavy lifting.
Construction began in 1031, when it was intended as a Kurdish garrison. At the end of the 11th century it became a target of the Crusaders, under Raymond de-Gilles of Toulouse. From 1142, Christians occupied the fort, holding out against even the most determined assaults of our other recently visited friend Saladin, and succumbing only in 1271 to Sultan Beybersâsometimes called the last man standing in the Crusadesâa Muslim sultan who swept the Christian fundamentalists out of Syria.
The see-saw of conquest is reflected in an assortment of Arabic and Latin inscriptions chiselled into the clammy walls of this gigantic stone-and-brick labyrinth. We spend an hour testing its echo-chamber effects, sunbaking in its courtyards, and generally acting like carefree children on the last day of term.
DAY 313 (21 MARCH): HAMA
The Orontes is only a stream, but wending its way through this peaceful-looking town it passes the medieval waterwheels that symbolise Hama and remain its most enduring memory. Tremendously powerful, they creak like mechanical monsters from the Industrial Revolution.
The Basman Hotel makes me feel at home, but not in a patronising, charitable way as if my being in a wheelchair made a difference: the Basman makes everyone feel at home. This turns out to be just as well, because I am on the eve of a painful episode, and the hotel's capacity for TLC is about to be stretched to the maximum.
DAY 314 (22 MARCH): APAMEA
This morning finds me tied to another knot of day trippers, in a taxi headed along backroads two hours north-west of Hama. Our destination is Apamea, an excavated granite city from Roman times that flourished from the second century BC until AD 540, when the Persians overran it.
After Palmyra and the ancient wonders of Lebanon (not to mention Persia), I am becoming something of an ancient-world buff, and promise myself to add this to my résumé. I love the thought that here, where my wheels are but passing through, other people once lived, scarcely giving a thought to the notion that 2000 years later someone would pass by, looking in pity or awe at the residue of their daily lives.
This day is ideal for such sobering reflection: dark clouds rumble, threatening rain. Indeed, the evidence of a solid downpour overnight is at our feet for the marble strip of road is hidden here and there by puddles.
Those puddles prove my downfall. As my wheels wade through one of them, with considerably more effort than usual, I cannot see that the next marble slab in this ancient paved highway is slightly higher than the ones around it. The impact of my casters hitting the exposed slab pitchforks me head over heels. Instinctively I roll myself into a ball, going with the flow, to lessen the risk of breaking bones.
Even as this emergency unfolds, I recall being embarrassed that it is taking place in front of a tour group (French, from the exclamations I hear them utter), or indeed in anyone's presence. A Syrian man comes to my assistance, considerately lifting me back into the chair.
By the time the taxi returns me to Hama, the dull soreness that followed my fall has sharpened into a throbbing fusillade of pains emanating every few seconds from my inflamed big toes. The driver and fellow passengers offer sympathy; and I try to deflect their concern by making light of the whole affair, wondering aloud how the ancient Romans ever acquired such a good reputation as road builders.
Back in Hama, Abdullah from the Basman Hotel swings into action. After detailing hotel staff to lift my sorry sedentary form, in the chair, up to my first-floor room, he arranges a relay of tin basins filled with water to soak my feet in and ease the swelling.
Perhaps an hour has passed when there is a knock on my door and in walks Dr Mustafa Abdel Jawad. The details of his treatment need not detain us: anti-inflammatory tablets and a couple of days' rest do the trick.
But Dr Jawad is no ordinary medic. On his second visit, when he sees I'm on the non-Roman road to recovery, he hands me a written report and a CD outlining a most remarkable surgical operation.
It is a case study Dr Jawad clearly hopes will establish his medical reputation worldwide, and I see he has already presented this report to an obscure medical congress. In 1998, Jawad informed the congress, a patient of his, Mr M.K., presented with what X-rays showed was a small abdominal mass which turned out to comprise fourteen metal items: seven wrenches, two long needles, three long paperclips and a needle in two parts. âAll these instruments were oxidised and black because they have stayed more than three months in the stomach and the colon,' Dr Jawad told delegates, who no doubt received this intelligence with an amazement equal to my own.
Reporting his ârare surgical management for metal instruments in the digestive system', the pioneering Dr Jawad reported that, following his âvery good diagnosis and very careful operation, the patient became healthy'.
What he didn't tell them or me, and apparently didn't bother to inquire, was how Mr M.K. came to have so many spanners in his works, so to speak.
Was he a motor mechanic with an iron deficiency? A circus performer? We may never know.
DAY 315 (23 MARCH): ALEPPO
I can now claim to have crossed the Arab world. Aleppo, or Haleb as they call it here, is laid out in a European-style street pattern, with its own Christian Quarter sporting more than a few shop signs in Armenian. These facts reflect, respectively, the town's historical ties with EastâWest trade and its proximity to Turkey, from which a sizeable Armenian community fled here after the genocide last century.
But the Arab world is here, too, and for me this is its last outpost. Aleppo's vast covered souq provides more adventure than I bargained for.
Grot and grime and even odd tufts of grass overgrowing the mortar serve as a reminder that traders have spent their working lives in this vast, sprawling market since AD 1500, in some cases earlier. âFabulous' is the term applied by the guidebook and, although brochures always rhapsodise in such terms, Aleppo's souq merits the description.
Wheeling a few metres down the main corridor, I spy an interesting sign above the butcher's shop that occupies a recess on my left. Backing into a corner, I take out my camera and train the lens fractionally above the horizontal, aware as I do so that the result should also capture a nice, busy bazaar crowd at the same time as the wording on the sign.
âClick' I go. No flash, but an almighty shout, a whoop of rage, issues from a bearded man in a dirty jellaba about five metres in front of me. His livid face is not mollified by my pointing to the sign above his head. He is clearly accusing me of taking his photo without permission.
In his fury he makes a sudden move to the butcher's block, picking up a carving knife and waving it samurai-like in front of my face. I must have blanched but there is no obvious escape route. If I wheel backwards, I could easily tip up the chair and be at his mercy. Reversing and scurrying down the avenue involve turning my back, not exactly a smart alternative.