Is death always an end? How does one ending bring about a new beginning? From where do memories originate and from what? How do we recover those that have been lost? And in what ways do memories constitute history? The novel, Qasr al-Matar (1993), by the Syrian author Mamduh Azam, is an attempt to narrate the process of returning to a lost memory. The novel describes the transmigration of a soul between bodies and experiences. Incorporating local story telling techniques and popular belief systems from the Druze community of Syria, the narrative constructs an external historical discourse, i.e. a space for writing history. This history is a collection of lost memories, carried across time by a soul, leaving the physical elements (the bodies) of history behind. This soul, carrying both meaning and memory, is a site of recuperation from the tyranny of existence, and from the tyranny of erasure. Leaving the body/bodies behind in biological time, the soul – the memories – transgresses to historical time, and in this way becomes integral to its narration. On the surface, the novel is about the Syrian struggle against French rule in the first half of the 20th century, and as such, can be considered an historical novel. But as one uncovers the intertextual reference points in the novel, other historical levels reveal themselves; that of the social “collective” and further, the mask of despotic rule that swallows history and the people born in it. In this paper, I will consider how intertextuality, in this case with Plato’s Republic, Druze mystical (and secretive) tenets, and local storytelling techniques, converge and create a narrative that constitutes an ending, an ending in the sense of returning to a beginning, to the process of creation, and in the case of this narrative, to a history that transcends its time.