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As I moved through Syria, I became an idiosyncratic time traveller; quickly realising it is impossible to tread anywhere that hasn’t already been visited, inhabited or invaded by Phoenicians and Egyptians, Romans, Mamluks and the Knights Templar. TE Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Roosevelt all made pilgrimages; even those cheery folk from Mossad took time out to make a day trip and detonate a car bomb in Damascus on the day of my arrival. The pull of the place is undeniable.

Travelling from Palmyra to Aleppo takes about four hours by road, half of which is spent driving through desert. Truck convoys idled under the intense sun in the ghostly footprints of the ancients, parked up in dusty lay-bys waiting for night to fall before heading on their way to Iraq. A signpost for Baghdad alerted me to a border that was only a few miles away and somehow made the fabled and troubled city more real now that I had seen an arrow pointing in its direction. Huge vistas gradually opened out to far-off mountains and played spatial tricks with distance. Mirages were rife, impossible pools of glistening water dissolved into awful beauty; Bedouin tents appeared far away, the simple shelters for nomadic herdsmen looking incongruous because of the huge satellite dishes propped up against them. My driver told me his mobile phone still had a signal; information that was somehow disappointing. Even in that inhospitable, barren, desolate place it was still possible to phone a friend.

I think I could have happily driven through desert forever, but modern development intruded and villages, towns and sprawling factories belonging to a tropical industrial estate in Coventry altered the landscape on the way to Aleppo.

Aleppo claims to be the oldest, continually inhabited city in the world – a crown that Damascus or Benares might dispute; but who cares about a millennium or two? Nothing could change the magic of the place, apart from finding out that the bar at the Hotel Baron was unexpectedly dry. The faded grandeur of the place is grottily charming; it’s ostentatious façade, glorious.

At the centre of the city is the citadel; a vast 12th century fortress with roots that dig deep into a hill and into history. It dominates not just the old town, but the entire modern metropolis of three million. A dozy and dusty museum houses a few glass cabinets, several cannon and a model of the fort. A guide feebly vied for attention. He was overly proud of his ability to read medieval Arabic; only for me to discover that this is the language of the Koran and is familiar to all scholars who’ve studied it; i.e. most folk around those parts.

Below the citadel’s awesome walls lies the souk, or market place. This labyrinth is everything and more one could want of the place; cavernous with the feel of a catacomb. Pierced domes dropped dense lasers of light swirling with dust into pitch alleyways; a startling effect that briefly illuminated a trader before he fell into darkness again. The coolness was a welcome relief from the heat outside.

Split carcasses revealed ribbed and fatty innards on the butcher’s stand; testicles the size of pears hung like pendulums beside slathers of liver, spleen and other organs; the smell of blood was fresh. Fresh olives were lime green with their own special scent. Round men in djellabas left the whiff of tobacco, cinnamon and cloves in their wake. Slabs of honeycomb, sacks of rose petals, walnuts, almonds, cashews and pistachios filled innumerable stalls.

Clouds of brightly lit gold and syrupy perfumes mugged the senses and spiced the air, but what made the place so precious is that it’s a working, living market and no tourist trap peppered with maddening carpet salesmen or trinket-mongers. A large man itched at his balls as two Armenian women haggled over the price of a sequinned purse; their friend took time to pick over fabrics with more dazzle than a Christmas tree. Sheepskin and herbs were lazily inspected by a man heaped in scarves; sandalwood and jasmine floated in from another quarter. I was entranced.

My reverie was shattered; a man selling clothing leaned out from his booth and said: ‘Pleased to meet me.’

He was camp and vaguely predatory, full of ‘lovely jubblies’; a strange mixture of Essex prattle and the Levant. I smiled and attempted to escape, but he wouldn’t let me go. A boy brought us small cups of thick, sweet coffee flavoured with cardamom. ‘Is good, keep you awake all night and make you horny.’

The coffee was good – but that was it. Further along I met a man who claimed to be the other’s brother, then another, and then another. Eleven brothers from the same family worked one small section of the souk. One of the siblings showed me a photograph of them all lined up; not unlike an inflationary publicity shot for the Four Tops.

Yet another brother wanted to speak. He could well be the bogus Cockney written about by Robert Tewdr Moss (in his book Cleopatra’s Wedding Present) except the coiffured and limp bunny claimed to have lived in Edinburgh. When he heard I live in London he asked: ‘from Soho? I spent three nights in London, two nights in Heaven and one in a hotel in Paddington. The squalor is lovely there, have you been?’ I made to leave, then he piped up: ‘Boy George, ta-ta…’

The Great Mosque Al-Jamaa al-Kebir is in the heart of the souk; it was closed for renovations but I knocked at the door situated in Souk ibn al-Khasbah and was let in regardless. Half-a-dozen elderly men in white hats sat in chairs outside the entrance – every one of them carried a cane. The mosque is beautiful, a great open, silent relief from the bustle outside; its stone walls are the colour of sun-bleached bones.

Across the way is the Madrassa Halawiyya – a Muslim school. In its echoing prayer hall are the 6th century remains of the cathedral of Saint Helen; a semi-circular row of six columns. A sold-fuel stove sat incongruously in front of them, its long skinny chimney reaching perhaps thirty feet to a vent in the ceiling. An ancient man sat at a low lectern clattering beads and turning the pages of the Koran while quietly murmuring to two women. The huge floor was covered in dozens of red rugs.

There’s a little of Havana on the streets of Aleppo’s old town. Numerous cars from the 60’s – and earlier – jostled for space with vehicles of a more recent vintage. Two knackered Mercs lumbered by; one was yellow and patched with filler, the other white and looking fit to spring apart from the elastic bands holding it together. It was here, hidden down an alleyway in the Al-Jdeida area of the city, that I found a 17th century house now converted into a restaurant. Baronial axes and swords lined the lumpen, theatrical stone walls. I ordered a small meze and a half-bottle of wine, only for a teacup and saucer to be delivered to my table. The wine waiter arrived, apologised for the fact that he was unable to serve wine that day before opening the bottle with great ceremony. He poured a drop into the cup and waited with starchy formality for me to taste it. I was instructed to conceal the bottle under the table. The meze was knockout. Haricot beans and garlic nudged towards heaven, a stuffed vine leaf was almost treacly, a small ball of spiced meat just so. The mixture of flavours is probably as good as it gets.

At night the souk is empty except for silent cats and shadows. I walked through the dead streets to a hammam, entering the building down a long narrow staircase and emerging in a large panelled room. In the centre was a rectangular pool. I was provided with a thin towel and left my clothing on a high divan covered in rugs and my wallet in a small lock-up drawer before heading down a twisting marble flight into the steam.

The shouts and joshing of other folk hit me before the steam. In the cloudy, hot room sat six men on a raised dais, peeling oranges and eating roast chicken – not unlike the ancient Romans. Constantly splashing hot water filled the sultry atmosphere. I was scrubbed by an old man with olive soap that he’d whisked into a thick lather, in a small antechamber. Another man took over, pulling at my arms and cracking my back, before mauling my legs, sitting me upright and cricking my neck. A ricochet rattled out from each quick twist. I emerged light-headed and spectacularly clean – my skin squeaked. Upstairs, an old-boy held out a fresh towel for me like a mother might her child on the beach. More hot towels were wrapped around my waist, chest, shoulders and head until I felt heaped like a laundry basket and ready to sleep forever.

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