EVERYTHING IN DAMASCUS is fabulously, incomprehensibly filthy, coated in talcum-fine desert grit. It is a city of more than a million, with an outermost layer of cement plants and car dealerships, the dry skin shed by a snake. Inside that husk is a noir new city, a wilderness of empty architectural gestures, never-finished towers of rebar, and abstract avenues that lead to theoretical traffic circles. Orwell designed this Damascus: The Ministry of Information prevents anyone from having information, the Ministry of Economy and Trade strangles the economy, and the Ministry of the Interior meddles in other country's affairs. Every car, shop, and house carries a painting, photo, or decal of President al-Assad—Hafez or Bashar, take your pick.

At dusk, this new city drops its shutters, leaving scattered pockets of seedy nightlife—vinyl "superclubs" that open at midnight, stocked with expensive liquor and Ukrainian dancers. But in the mornings, a better Damascus emerges, the Old City. Still girded with an oval of Roman walls pierced with nine gates, this ancient Damascus is packed with sweet shops, antique dealers, minarets, and, at its heart, the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque, where the relics of many religions slumber side by side.

On my first morning in town, the mosque was crowded with busloads of Shiites from Iran and Iraq. The black-clad women and weeping men moaned and beat themselves at the shrine of their

I learned three things in Damascus: The enemy has terrible taste in music. The Syrians probably invented food. And Muhammad had a point: At night, the grit disappears and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.

great martyr, Hussein, whose death 1,300 years ago begat the long, passionate drama that is Shiism. But the mosque offered dreams for the faithful of all stripes: Greek lettering on the foundation stones, from when it was a Christian cathedral; the remains of a third-century Roman temple; and, in the main prayer hall, a marble-clad catafalque said to contain the head of John the Baptist, who was executed by Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, around a.d. 30. Some Shiites got the wrong idea and fell to their knees, mistakenly crying out, "Hussein! Hussein!"

You can't throw an egg in the Old City without hitting a monotheist. In the Christian quarter, I ran into a group of 36 Spanish Catholics walking in the footsteps of Saint Paul. Paul had been blinded (and unhorsed) outside the city by a "light from heaven," and the Spaniards were now taking literally the injunction he'd received in Acts 9:11, to "arise and go into the street called Straight." Today the Via Recta has finned Cadillacs on it, but you can still see the Roman arch Paul would have passed under. The pilgrims had just come from the Old City wall where, wanted by the authorities, the fugitive evangelist had escaped in a basket lowered on ropes.

"It's a revelation to finally know what they knew," Juan Botey, a quiet, lean, gray-haired Catalan from Barcelona, explained. "To see the places they stood."

The Spaniards were almost silent as we marched down to the arched basement where Paul had been cured—well, more or less the place, since the location of these spots changes every few centuries. Like the Shiites, though, the Catholics had enough wonder to overcome navigational difficulties, and they launched into a mass in their soft Catalan dialect, not too far from the Latin that Paul would have heard in his day.

On the way back through the Muslim quarter, lost in a maze of alleys, I passed a few coffee shops stocked with European hipsters smoking hubble-bubble pipes and stumbled onto a converted old mansion, the headquarters of the Syrian Environmental Association (SEA). They were holding an open house, showing off art projects made from recycled materials and handing out "Don't Mess with Damascus" brochures. The chairwoman, a former director of Kalamoun University named Dr. Warka Barmada, quickly admitted that there isn't much of an environmental movement in Syria. She pointed to the Barada River, once a mountain stream sparkling through Damascus. If Paul were baptized there today, he'd come up with a plastic bag on his head and a bad rash: The Barada is a putrid trickle down a garbage-laced culvert.

Beyond the city, problems are legion. Logging in the northwest hill country. Desertification. Uncontrolled pollution by unaccountable industries. (But few petroleum spills—sadly for Syria's sputtering economy, this is one Middle East sand trap with little oil.) President al-Assad has set up a few tiny nature reserves, and a population of endangered oryx has been restored in the desert; other than that, Barmada said, little has been done "that I'm aware of."

"I'm not talking politics," she quickly cautioned. Syrians can only talk about what she called "politics with a small p," meaning issues of daily competence, the performance of government services. "We want to change from within," she added, "not by opposition."

But environmentalism can't help but carry a whiff of the capital P. The SEA, Friends of Damascus, and two other green groups are some of the only nongovernmental organizations in Syria. Aside from the dismal national soccer team, just about the only thing it is legal to complain about is the environment. Where else can young idealists go, if not to Dr. Barmada?

Syrians are largely indifferent to things like pollution, she said. "Since we have been a socialist country for a long time, people got used to saying the state will take care of every problem." But attitudes were changing, she pointed out, "now that we are going through a transition." She meant the vague changes Bashar had promised: economic reforms, the arrival of the Internet, even free speech. Little of it has come true.

Transition is a Syrian euphemism. A transition to something unspecified, a world after. After Bashar? After a cruise-missile strike? A civil war? The country was a cipher to its own people. Meanwhile, the Baath elite partied in the thumping nightclubs of Bab Touma, just inside the Roman wall. No-neck men in black suits and T-shirts manned the doors there, whisking in lanky honeys in tight jeans. I spent an hour one night spying from a rooftop restaurant as military officers caroused in the beer garden below. While demolishing ranks of stuffed grape leaves, grilled peppers, and 2004 Lebanese petit verdot, I learned three things. First, the enemy has terrible taste in music. Second, Syrians probably invented food. And third, Muhammad had a point: At night, under a cold moon, all the grit disappears, and the hillsides glitter with amber lights. Heaven, even here.