This intimate travelogue is a haunting story, not least because the author claims that Mark Antony gave Syria to Cleopatra as a wedding present. How fabulous is that? The author was a young gay English journalist who recounts his journey through the Syria of the 1990s, observing the country, “Our route crossed the great agricultural plains of north-east Syria, studded with villages of square baked-mud houses, which looked like blocks of chocolate,” and commenting on the politics, "We sat next to a fat man with a gun stuck in his pocket—a member of the Bath. the east of Syria, rich in pro-Iraq anti-government feeling, was infested with Party members and informers,” and indulging in love and romance, “I tried to dismiss from my mind a vivid passage from The Perfumed Garden, as translated by Burton, devoted to the seduction of sleeping Arab boys in communal quarters... “ Colorful and picaresque, Tewdwr Moss’s story reads like diary, open and intimate. Sadly, he was murdered in London right after he finished this book. He was 35 years old.