The Dream Maker by Jean-Christophe Rufin, Alison Anderson

halfway there, so to speak. I could still sever the last ties which connected me to my former life—abandon the galley, leave for the unknown and surrender to its decrees. This caravan, all of a sudden, had come to show me which way to go.
    I wandered among the camels, grazing their manes with my fingertips; I was subjected to terrible temptation. I went deeper and deeper into the compact mass of animals as they stamped the dust, impatient for the departure signal. It would be given at dusk. All day long my companions looked for me, for our little troop was due to leave at the same time for Damascus, which was not very far away. When they found me, initially I refused to follow them and remained deaf to their questions. They thought some mysterious ailment had deprived me of my reason and perhaps my understanding. In the end I stayed with them, but I lay motionless for many hours, distraught, lost in thought, my face distorted in a grimace of pain.
    Finally the memory of Macé and our children prevailed, and I gathered enough strength to cast off the temptation to leave, never to return. My companions rejoiced to see I was once again myself and had finally agreed to go with them. But they had no inkling of the conflict that had taken place inside me. How could I explain to them that I had just rejected the myriad lives I could have lived, in favor of the one life to which my prospects would now be limited? Inside I was suffering, mourning for those imaginary destinies. I had left for Damascus, my desires countless, and now I would arrive there stripped of those promises. There was only one thing left to do: to take the only life given me and strive to make it rich and happy. That would already be a great deal, but it would be so little.
    I had put the leopard back into his bag for a long time.
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    It was my good fortune that this crisis occurred at the outskirts of Damascus. To enter such a city at a time when I felt I was beginning a new life that was deprived of all the others was a consolation and a joy. What I hadn’t felt in Beirut was even more obvious in Damascus: this city was truly the center of the world.
    And yet it had suffered serious destruction, not merely as a result of the wars against the Franks but also of Turkish incursions. The most recent of these, a few years before my visit, was that of Tamerlane: he had torched the city. Ebony beams and sandarac varnish had gone up in flames. Only the great Mosque of the Umayyads had survived the disaster. The city had not yet been completely rebuilt when I arrived there. And yet it exuded an impression of power and unequaled wealth. It was the primary destination for the caravans, and its markets were overflowing with all the wonders that human industry can produce. The mixture of races was even more astonishing than in Beirut. It was said that the Christians had been put to the sword by the Mongols until there were none left. But many Latin merchants had returned and could be seen about the streets. Franciscan monks from France, the Cordeliers, welcomed us at a monastery they kept at the disposal of pilgrims and Christians passing through. Damascus was linked to Cairo and many other towns by a service of rapid couriers mounted on camels. We received news of our companions who had stayed in Egypt and were able to send them our news.
    Above all, Damascus had a wealth of fabulous gardens. This art, taken to the most extreme refinement, seemed to me on a par with architecture as the sign of a great civilization. The noblemen in our parts, locked away in their fortresses and constantly threatened with plunder, did not have the leisure to arrange the earth in the way they arranged stone. We knew only two worlds: the town or the country. Between the two, the Arabs had invented the ordered, welcoming place of enclosed nature that is the garden. To do this, they had simply reversed all the qualities of the desert. They had replaced its vast openness with