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oddly impertinent, and I knew full well that almost no one can unravel the mystical threads of the Ismaili.
    So I asked him instead about his vineyards in the Bekaa Valley.
    “The Bekaa is dominated by Hezbollah now. And I am sure one day they will cut the water to the vineyards. Well, I say they might do it, not that they will. They can’t make Lebanon dry, but they can make it drier.”
    He watched me drink with a shrewd looseness, his head slightly tilted, and asked me again if I thought Kefraya was a wine that could do well in America. It was, to me, a wine crafted with precisely that in mind. “Good, good,” he said.
    When the meal was over, we moved to arak. He was pleased that we liked Château Kefraya and his own arak, and that we seemed to understand that his country was made of shifting sands, and that one day he might condemn the teetotalers in black on the far side of the hills and the next year join forces with them to survive.
    “And you,” he said, “you seem to like your wine. How do you find our arak?”
    “It’s like ouzo, only better.”
    “The Greeks took it from us, not the other way around. Arak is the soul of Lebanon. Another one?”
    I was already a little slow.
    “I am half Irish,” I said. “It’s best not to get me drinking at two o’clock in the afternoon. The genes.”
    I felt the slight panic even now as my hand was curled around a tiny glass of arak, and the old man’s eyes were on that hand as well. It was as if this shrewd observer of human nature had suddenly detected the flaw in my person, which was not even a very well-disguised flaw. The arak gave off a slightly juicy fragrance, and its clarity made it seem innocuous.
    After lunch we toured the grounds. Jumblatt’s castle is landscaped with cypresses and rosebushes and the Roman sarcophagi that he likes to collect. A greyhound loped silently alongside as we were shown the grounds. He took us into his designer library, filled with his father’s Soviet memorabilia. The Jumblatts were Soviet allies during the civil war, and Brezhnev sent Walid’s father, Kamal, this life-size oil of Marshal Zhukov astride a white horse, as well as some lovely military pistols that are now displayed on Walid’s desk. A splendid library with a fine collection of La Nouvelle Revue Française .
    “Yes,” he said fondly. “How glamorous Communism seemed in those days. How inevitable.”
    “Did Khrushchev,” I asked, “send any rare vodka over?”
    “I can’t recall. He may have.”
    I walked out into the gardens and looked at the tombs with their stone garlands and putti and I saw the snowlines of the Shuf through the cypresses. I was still vibrating from the wine and the arak, and I could not hold my senses still. The landscape seen through arak , I thought. Luminous and reposed and near. Distilled, you might say. Clarified and intensified to the point of serene madness.

The Ally Pally
                                       In Abu Dhabi, I awoke late in the afternoon in the Fairmont Bab al Bahr. I was in the same clothes that I had been wearing for weeks in Beirut, and with a headache so severe that I had to lie there for some time and try to remember where I had been the night before. It is curious to wake up fully clothed, and my clothes were wet. I was in a suit with cufflinks attached, a tie askew, slip-ons with no socks. I was dressed, in other words, for a late-night party of moderate but not quite serious elegance. There was a bowl of fruit by the bed with a banana and a star anise and, next to them, a tray of handmade chocolates. Nothing had been touched.
    I sat in my room on the eighth floor of the Bab al Bahr as the sun was declining. A thin moon had appeared over the waterway that separated the hotel’s artificial beach from the cranes and silos on the far side. There, in a fluctuating light, stood the world’s eighth-biggest mosque, eighty-two Mogul-inspired Bianco marble domes clustered