A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all. He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows.

Gabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter's perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems. A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain.

Time takes life away and gives us memory, gold with flame, black with embers.

Cities at daybreak are no one's, and have no names. And I, too, have no name, dawn, the stars growing pale, the train picking up speed.

This day's nothingness as if from spite became a flame and scorched the lips of children and poets.

I drink from a small spring, / my thirst excedes the ocean.

And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it's an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely.

Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists a meaning, hidden from day to day, but accessible in moments of greatest attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

But I was only a chaotic walker, nobody could stop me even a totalitarian state was not able to control my daydreams, my poetic fascinations, the pattern of my walking.

Clear moments are so short. There is much more darkness. More ocean than terra firma. More shadow than form.