BACK IN DAMASCUS, the veneer didn't seem ready to crack. At a glossy restaurant row full of the Syrian elite, men jockeyed BMWs and Porsches in the valet lots, and Syrian valley girls chatted on their cell phones and ordered sushi as tropical fish swam beneath their feet. Well-educated people told me that, honestly, no Syrians were fighting in Iraq. (Sixty-six have been captured on the battlefield.) No Syrians had been involved in the assassination in Lebanon. (According to Detlev Mehlis, at least six Syrian officials were aware in advance.) President Bashar al-Assad was a farsighted leader, a lovely man. If I knew him for two minutes I would love him. Israel was behind it all.

Meanwhile, the country held its breath. Outside the great Umayyad Mosque, black cars disgorged "regime elements": colonels, generals, and secret policemen in tracksuits and dark glasses. Shiites and Sunnis pushed up against each other, crowded by Christians and Kurds. Even a congenital atheist could be swept up in the riptide of faith.

The Syrians are trying to close their 376-mile border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it's too late: America is already here.

On my last afternoon in Damascus, I followed a stream of Iraqi Shiite pilgrims through the streets of the Old City to the tomb of Raquaya, the daughter of Ali. Five hundred people were trying to enter, and 200 to leave, and the alley changed in an instant from absurdly crowded to dangerously panicked. Amid screaming, shoving, wailing, and angry chants, an elderly woman was knocked down and trampled under a sea of black chadors. Frightened children were passed over the heads of the crowd, surfing the high emotions of a Shiite Lollapalooza. We were on the verge of another ritual, the holy stampede. I fought my way out of the crowd with a new appreciation for the enormous, devotional suffering at the heart of Shiism.

Out in the vast eastern deserts, new defeats await. At the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a sleepy guard waved me into the Temple of Bel when I appeared at first light, too early for the posted hours. "OK," he said wearily, "you can look." A once prosperous stop on the Silk Road, Palmyra may possess the greatest array of antiquities in all of the Middle East, which is really saying something. Colonnaded avenues led for three miles through temples, courts, senates, and bathhouses, ending finally, fittingly, in mortuary towers that ran into the far desert. The futility of empire, the dusty brevity of human ambition, came crashing home, punctuated by the roar of Syrian MiGs passing overhead on their dawn patrol. Iraq was about 80 miles away. The Syrians are trying to close the border, putting up a berm to stop vehicles and pleading for night-vision equipment to track illegal crossings. But it is too late: America is already here. Army Rangers have already had bloody incidents of "friction" with Syrian patrols, and undercover commandos—"special-mission units," in Pentagon parlance—have reportedly been sent in to stalk the safe houses of the Iraq insurgency. Like the past, the future is now.

Walking out of Palmyra at 7:15 in the sun-bright morning, I ran smack into the same Dutch tour group. Same minivan, same tour guide. "You see?" I told him. "The American is still alive."

I left Palmyra in a powder-blue Mercedes with the voluptuous curves of the 1950s. For an hour we paralleled the invisible border, nothing but dust between here and the war. A traffic sign with a huge arrow pointed left: baghdad, it read. I went right.

As we raced for Damascus, straight as an arrow, a huge chocolate-brown hawk dropped into formation beside the car. The bird coasted above the roadside ditch at 60 miles an hour, barely moving a feather, grazing the top of the weeds, head down, hunting.