I hear a voice you cannot hear,
__Which says, I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
__Which beckons me away.
—Tickell

Abdullah drove a fifty-year old-Peugeot 504, a smurf blue station wagon, with a Qur’an on the dash and a luggage rack and seats for eight. He was a jolly, grinning man in a moustache and a robe, who picked us up at the Tourist Rest House in Al-Qasr just after breakfast. He drove us through a desolation of crags and dust and powerlines, towards the Kharga Oasis and Luxor.

In Kharga Town we picked up a police escort, on account of the American in the vehicle, and Abdullah told us in his pidgin English not to pay them any backsheesh when they asked. We picked up food and drove it 15 minutes out of town, to a little tea house with a television. Our driver wanted Amelia to dance like the women on television, but she said No and pointed to her anguished stomach—“Baby?”

As it got dark we entered a smoggy world of rubble and canals and palm trees. They still call it the Nile! The lifegiving river no longer floods with the astronomical precision that inspired the ancients. The High Dam prevents it. Irrigation drains it. The cataracts are gone. The trash on the palm-lined banks smokes and steams. The river is a polluted thing, bloated like a corpse, exploited in a slow autopsy by eighty million undertakers.

In nighted Luxor we took a ferry across the river to the east bank and climbed stairs up to the corniche that ran along the illuminated pillars of the Temple of Luxor, massive things shaped like papyrus scrolls. There were five of us, I remind the patient Reader: Denniz, Sven, Jean, Amelia, and myself. We circled the Temple and went straight to the Oasis Hotel, recommended by Yashar for its quality and the cheap food served on its rooftop terrace. The Hotel was full, but the manager laid out mattresses in a lobby and I passed right out on mine.

Jean, Amelia, and I had already been in Egypt for our 30 days allotted, and had to extend our visas. I went into a little photo shop to get passport pictures, and came out with several of those and also a very lame chop job of my face surrounded by Egyptian statues and pyramids. Some filter had cleaned my skin of every blemish so that I looked vaguely vampiric.

Immediately, we decided to return to take a group picture. The wall was coated with inspiration: Babies with Angelina Jolie and Beyonce dancing with them, women with their faces silhouetted in the background, glittering like diamonds. Denniz liked the picture of a toddler Photoshopped in front of a war zone, with a milk bottle grenade at his waist, an M16 over his shoulder, and a radioactive symbol on his diaper, but the photographer told us, “No, it is finished.” What we ended up with was nonetheless satisfactory.

The visa extending process took only two hours, thankfully, and that night we went into the Temple of Luxor, lit up by spotlights and the flashes of a thousand cameras. We meandered through the hieroglyphs and cartouches, columns and statues, until we had seen all the rooms, and then walked down the Avenue of Sphinxes, between a hundred of the riddlers. That road once proceeded for two kilometers to the Temple of Karnak, a structure that would fit the Luxor Temple in its annex.

We walked through the monumental contributions of Seti I, Ramses II, the Nubian kings of Egypt, and Alexander the Great, guided by an old man named Yusuf, who wore a woolen sweater under his shirt despite the heat. He told us of Ramses’ love for Nefertari, his first wife, and that even though he married 50 wives after Nefertari’s tragic death, none of them could replace his greatest romance. “Come to enjoy your eyes, by the miracle of the—earth,” said Yusuf as we entered the Hippostyle.

One hundred and thirty-four columns, ten feet across and spaced as far apart as they were wide, gave the impression of a redwood forest, but the roof, 120 feet up, was an open arbor of stone rafters. The light they let in cast lined shadows on the carvings on the wall, that staggering accumulation of symbols that meant so much to millennia of high priests and god kings. Some still maintained their original colors: deep blues, sanguine reds, golden yellows, and whites like eyes. The desert started at the edge of this hall, dusty palms and a slope of rubble-strewn strand.

I stopped to ruminate and write about it. “What you write?” asked Yusuf. “You talk to Amon Re? What do the gods say to you?”

“It must be annoying to be an American sometimes,” said Denniz, that night in the Sinbad cafe. The Temple of Luxor was just across the street. “Everyone has an opinion, and they must always want to talk about it.”

This did not stop Jean and I from debating it the next day, in the Valley of the Kings. We rented bikes from the hotel and rode them down to the ferry, on benches between men in robes and turbans and women veiled and hooded. Camels stalked the palmy banks, and the sun buried the clouds. We rode up a long highway through green plantations, past the Colossi of Memnon and the Tomb of Hatshepsut, and up a long winding hill to where the Pharaohs were buried.

Of the fifty tombs, most looted since antiquity but still displaying the painted frescoes that accompanied the dead kings into the afterlife, only a handful were open, and our ticket allowed us into a mere three. We chose Tausert and Setnakht, Ramses III, and Ramses IV. The last of these had Coptic graffiti everywhere, names and crosses and kindergarten depictions of saints, and in the final room a strange image on the ceiling with the sky goddess Mut bent over day and night scenes.

The place was empty except for a few Russian tour groups. Those leggy, light-haired women persisted in wearing short shorts and tank tops in spite of the cultural climate. The older they got, the crabbier they were, until they were hissing and clapping at Jean and I for talking near their guide-lecturer. We lunched on bread and Kiri cheese and honey, and began to speak about the United States. I said I admired the well-meaning naïvete and stubborn persistence that drives Americans to bumbling global crusades, though I despised the wars and those pulling the strings of honest people; and Jean had nothing but contempt for the simple, stupid salt of the earth. Our debate ended as many do, in an agreement to disagree.

“Well,” I said to Amelia, “Jean says that Americans are horrible since we live off resources we steal from other countries, and I said Americans are awesome because…”

“You live off resources you steal from other countries?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

Amelia and I had made three hand massage bets after that first one at the Egyptian Museum, and that night we checked the Internet to see who won; I lost all three. We had all developed a deep appreciation, approaching an addiction, for Egypt’s rice pudding—rice soaked in sweet condensed milk, sometimes broiled in an oven for a moment to give it a dark sheen. Jean and I made a couple bets with the desert as the prize. As it turned out, the Nile was the world’s longest waterway (Jean 1), and the Roman Empire did not use trebuchets (Me 1). The Frenchman was typically ecstatic over the former, shouting, “Fuck you!” at everyone who voted for the Amazon, and scornfully insolent when he lost the latter bet.

“Okay,” he said, “so I don’t know all this technical details about when the Middle Ages started, or Byzantine Empire, or whatever, so it’s not a real bet. And China had trebuchets in like 500 BC. Come on.”

Denniz and Sven also owed each other a few rice puddings. “Rice pudding is a new currency,” declared Denniz. Sven offered to just give the Dane the money, but Denniz said, “I only accept rice pudding.”

Denniz was mostly bedridden with some cold-flu, and Sven would send the most piteous, disdainful looks northward toward his neighbor. “Stop looking at me that way Sven!” “It’s pathetic, really. Unbelievable. Is this how they do things across the border?”

Amelia got word from a friend’s little sister, who bore the monicker of Little Budge, that the girl would have a free day in Cairo at the end of her week long tour. Jean was excited to meet the 23-year-old, but Amelia told him, “I think she’s out of your age range,” to which the Frenchman obscenely replied, “I put my tongue in younger stuff.” From his bed, Denniz asked, “Are we still talking about rice pudding here?”

And meanwhile Jean began to realize what Conrad called “the shadow of impending separation”—after two months traveling together, we had three more days. Jean wanted to return to Syria, and his visa expired in ten days. He also had to return to Jordan to sell his motorbike, which would never make the return journey through the Anatolian mountains in the frozen grasp of winter, and he did not know how he was getting back to Paris, or when, or even if he would return home before he went to live in Japan in June.

Our train up the Nile to Aswan, near the Sudanese border, left the next evening. We spent the day emerged in koshary and stuffed falafel and a cloud of shisha smoke, and then bid farewell to Denniz, whose overnight service to Cairo left at 11—godspeed, Sea Lake, thou Viking Turk, on your way home and back to the cacophonous road of possible futures that all the young must narrowly walk—and went to the station for our 5 o’clock train, which ended up leaving at 8. Thankfully and eventually we got seats, and Jean and I talked about literature and things while Amelia and Sven listened to the available iPods.

(Denniz had the tragic luck to sit in a nest of a chair on his overnight to Cairo, and woke up with 200 bites all down his back side. He was still finding more even after returning to Denmark on Friday. His story gave us a sleepless night on our own trip back to Cairo. “If I could chose between no sleep or all these bites,” Denniz said, “I’d take no sleep.”)

One man owns all the feluccas in Aswan, which is kith and kin to all the steamboats in St. Louis. He is a good man, the sailors say, but not a happy one. A homosexual, he made his initial fortune as a boy hustler. His fleet of shallow clippers, their triangular sails billowing in the wind, filled the panorama of the Nile in Aswan, sailing upstream and downstream between the town on the Eastern bank, the long narrow islands, and the barren eastern bank, where a few palm trees gave way quickly to steep dunes and rocky desert, marked by the ruins of noble tombs and a monastery, and overlooked the the Dome of Ali, Father of the Wind.

As we walked down the corniche above the rushing river, the owner’s touts aggressively proposed felucca voyages and day trips to our band, which must have seemed to them as four great dollar signs. We took the ferry across the waterway to Gaziret Aswan, which the Greeks called Elephantine Island, and walked through the Nubian village there. Nubians are proudly distinct from the Egyptians who have dominated their history. The ancient race of Kush and Meroe dwell in the south, near the Sudanese border, black-skinned, tall and sinewy, with a calm bearing and dormant intellect.

The Nubians painted the mudbrick walls of their dusty town in bright, earthy colors, and decorated them with simplistic art: the silhouettes of birds and beasts. A woman peeked her healthy face out of a doorway and invited us in for tea. Painted murals decorated the small inner court where we waited for our drinks, and the woman showed us her drooling offspring, Mohammed. We wandered up past the luxury hotels that loom above the marshes on the long, skinny islands northern tip, smoked a shisha at the Nubian House overlooking the island where Lord Kitchener planted an English garden, and then our hunger drove us back south to the ferry crossing, back across to the city to find chicken.

Aswan was cheap—my bed was $3, and a full chicken dinner cost but $2. We four shared a room with a desolate bathroom, and a shower that barely worked. “The cold robinet will not turn at all,” said Jean. “We only have hot water, and it’s boiling hot. I was trying on it for like half an hour, like hrrrr. It’s stuck man.” Sven went in next and turned the tap immediately. “Come on,” said the German, “what are you, a girl? I turned it right away. Are you a pussy or what?”

The town suffered from a prohibition of shisha, as Egypt attempted to stop an outbreak of H1N1 influenza, aka the Swine Flu, which had claimed 44 lives already and infected thousands. Those corkscrew tailed pathogens dwelt in the water bowl and hose and stand of the hookah, and launched themselves squealing at the Orientals. Thus, none of the restaurants could serve them. Old men sat around small tables looking grim and tired of the world, nursing a melancholic boredom in absence of the usual remedy.

Most who travel to Aswan take the tour south to Abu Simbel, the monument of Ramses II and his beloved Nefertari in old Nubia. Because the monuments lie close to the Sudanese border and three hours from Aswan, the tours leave in a convoy, under military escort, at 5 in the morning. Jean, Sven, and I got up at 3 for this voyage and moped about until the cars were loaded and checked for bombs. Most sites along the Upper Nile have been cut and disassembled and moved from their original locations to make way for Lake Nasser, the serpentine body of water formed by the High Dam. The four seated statues of Ramses look across a space of ground to the four smaller figures of Nefertari. They guard caves with painted scenes of fantastic battles, and more mundane collections of food images.

On the return journey we stopped at the (damn) High Dam, then the Island of Philae, to see the Roman Temple of Isis. Our boat pilot was a 16-year-old Nubian, who told me proudly that Obama was also half Nubian, and half-Egyptian. “Oh,” I said. The temple was a half-caste one, mixing Rome and Egypt. The columns bore different styles: palmy, swampy, Corinthian, and papyrus reeds.

At the Unfinished Obelisk, we three refused to pay the entry, but circled around the fence of the site looking for a free vantage point. We passed through a dirty alleyway onto a street and saw a cluster of women in the street. One pretty young woman came up to us and introduced herself as Lugna. “Obelisk?” she asked in her broken English. “Come, this way.” She took us and her brother and friends into a backyard, where we could not see a thing, and then started giving me her phone number and asking me questions.

“I love you, I miss you,” she said. I didn’t know what to say, so I called her, “Yimoza,” which means sweetheart in Arabic. At this her brother took on an expression of red rage, and started asking me for money. “Come on, you are American, you are rich.” We excused ourselves, and the brother escorted us down the hill with angry demands.

On our return we found Amelia still in bed, though she assured us that she was only napping. Together the four of us crossed the street to a little sandwich shop for something like lasagna. Jean went off to use the Internet—he left the next morning!—and Sven, Amelia and I got tea and sorely missed shisha. Were we suffering from withdrawals?

Later, Amelia and I walked down to a koshary place for noodles and rice pudding. Jean found us there, as we knew he would. Two months our triumvirate had been married! Our minds were connected, as Ahmad would say. We gifted our companion, on our divorcement, a pencil case and a drawing pad, with allusions to inside jokes written across the first page. He had been drawing in the blank pages of his copy of Robinson Crusoe, pictures of Egyptians and Scarabs and Vespas and Egrets. “For a long time I had my bike to worry about,” he said, “but now I’m kind of bored,” and in his boredom he turned to his old artistic hobby. Beaming with elation and gratitude, subdued with the worried expectation of the lonely road to come, he thanked us, and sent us ahead on the road back to the hotel while he bought us trinkets.

“Should we go to Cairo tomorrow?” asked Amelia, as we strolled up the boisterous Souq. “There’s not much to do here. I’d rather be somewhere with—.” She paused, and together, with the same impoverished, half-dreamy tone, we muttered, “Shisha.”

The next sunrise I got up at 6 with Jean and walked down to the station with him. We muttered a few things to each other on the way and tried to buy rice pudding, but the owner asked us for far too much and we left it. My friend the Frenchman boarded the train to Luxor, to pursue his many extravagant dreams, and I turned back into the street alone.

I’m on the pursuit of happiness and I know
Everything that shine ain’t always gonna be gold.
I’ll be fine once I get it. I’ll be good.
—KiD CuDi

We had to stand on the bus, since we had no tickets. The 7 a.m. was full to bursting with Cairenes and their belongings, and we waited with Yashar, who had just returned from Aswan, for the 8 a.m. departure to Bahariyya in the Western Desert. Three of our gang got seats on the bus, and we alternated between these and the aisle for the five hour trip. We were six, including myself: Jean of Paris, Amelia of Melbourne, Sven the East German, Denniz from Copenhagen, and Yashar of Vancouver, B.C. This diversity confused the Egyptians when they asked, “Where are you from?” They called us a cocktail or the United Nations.

A mob of them met us when we stepped off the bus in dusty Bawiti, chief township of the Bahariyya Oasis. They shouted at us in a pack, then picked us out individually as we moved to get our baggage—touts for desert safaris and sand dune tours and hotels with swimming pools, men in robes and turbans or jackets and jeans. We set our bags up under the hot tin roof of the bus stall and each ended up talking to one or two guides, receiving prices and business cards, until Yashar announced:

“Alright, we’re all talking to separate people. At this rate, we’re all going to be on different tours. Let’s go eat lunch.” At lunch, in Popular Restaurant, we discussed our options, and a crowd of desert dundees listened outside. “This one has a pool,” said Jean, and a tout shouted, “No it doesn’t,” through the latticework.

Yashar wasn’t hungry, so while we ate he left to bargain. He got prices from one of the guides, a Mahmoud, proposed the plans to our table, and we chose the 300 pound option—two jeeps, two nights in the desert, and home in time for Yashar’s 7 a.m. bus back to Cairo. Yashar left to try to wheedle the price down and returned shortly after. “Alright, so it’s still 300,” he said, “but I got us each two free postcards.”

Our guides and drivers were named Mahmoud and Mahmoud. One was the owner, with a vest over his long robe and a kefiyeh wrapped around his hawkish face. He had the dignity of a sheikh and alternated between liberal humor and pious faith. The second Mahmoud was a small, energetic Egyptian, ill-tempered when he got too little sleep or food. Presently, he had not eaten lunch—our contract interrupted his invitation to Boss’s house for a meal—and that made him grouchy and taciturn. The back of his 4×4 read: “Desert Safary For Ever Of Road.”

Day 1: We left late as Mahmoud & Mahmoud had to buy supplies. A jeep bearing three Koreans in desert garb is following our convoy, even though we said we’d rather be alone. The driver’s name is Hamad. His marriage to a Korean girl netted him all the tourists from the southern end of that peninsula.

Mahmoud the Greater led our train out of town through the desert, to avoid the police checkpoint that would have assigned an officer to our car, a service they provide to any and all citizens of America or Israel. The convoy took the road to the edge of the Black Desert, where volcanic cones have caked the sand with ash. We drove off the highway and angled up on top of a dune to use the sandboard from the Korean carriage. There were no foot straps, so we just sledded down, except Amelia who had some experience with it. Yashar wrestled Mahmoud the Lesser and won, using dirty skills learned from having two older brothers interested in martial arts. We watched the red sun set amid mazy clouds.

Getting away from the dune proved difficult. Mahmoud the Greater topped easily a steep sandbank up to the highway that nearly rolled Mahmoud the Lesser. His jeep stalled halfway up that high slope, and he turned to his passengers and said, with a subtle but profoundly infectious terror, “Get out now.” They left in a hurry and got the jeep down off of two wheels and pushed it out of the sand, though the crew demanded to ride with Mahmoud the Greater the following day.

“I taught him to drive,” said the Sheikh Mahmoud. “One year ago, he had never touched a wheel.” We drove on down the highway for ten miles or so, then turned off and whirled onto more sand dunes, weaving up and down at the whims of nature and Mahmoud. “You know,” spake the Greater, weaving his stick like a wand, “this is our job, but we do it because we love it. But you must drive out here, in the deep desert, not on asphalt. That is no fun. You must be quick to drive out here. Not quick with strength, or you will break off the shift, and then you’ll be stuck. You must move fast and control it.”

Mahmoud the Lesser and Hamad the Other followed as well as they could. In a valley between rock and dune, the three guides parked their cars to make three sides of a box, so that the corners were touching and at right angles. They unloaded rugs and mattresses from the rooftops and used them to seal the inside of the wagon circle in a kind of wall, with Eastern couches around a small table, and a gas stove just outside. We all took off our sandals and curled up under camel wool blankets that still smelled like those strange beasts, and the guides passed around some rolled cigarettes of some strange Eastern herb.

Amelia began to interview Sven, whose fascinating history was largely unknown to our group. The German was born under the mothering aegis of East German communism and the German Democratic Republic. He was seventeen when the wall came down. His parents brought him over to West Berlin, and he spent his 100 Deutschmark gift on a tape recorder and bananas. “Yes,” he said, “the stories are true—we never had bananas.” He spoke of the good and bad aspects of communism deplored the way the former are usually swept under the rug of the victors.

His father was a mayor under the Soviets and a construction entrepreneur under the capitalists. His uncle had made his way up in the diplomatic circuits of the People’s Party, only to have governments change on him. He only recently returned to the field—to the secretarial job he first held when he was seventeen years old. Sven was training to become a mechanic during the change and had to move to Bremen for three years to finish his schooling. Presently he works to travel, though he feels lonely in this vocation and detached from his friends and his home. “I’m really glad I met you guys when I did,” he said. “It’s good to travel with other people.”

Mahmoud & Mahmoud made a pan of red coals and pressed a grill down on it to sear carved chicken. Hamad cut up the salad and cooked the soup. “Isn’t he a good cook?” said Mahmoud. The Bedouin feast they served was excellent—soup and salad and bread and rice and chicken in deep dishes. Yashar ate so much he felt sick and had to lie down to settle his ballooning gut.

The rest of us took seats around the renewed fire and wondered at the stars and the moonscape of the desert. Waxing Luna resembled Yashar in the fullness of girth, barely splintered at one side, looking down on our proceedings with a streaked face. Mahmoud the Greater officiated the pouring of tea, and Mahmoud the Lesser drummed on a plastic water can with talented fingers. He sang songs in Arabic and called on us to dance by country.

“I love the desert,” he said, in a still moment,—“the sky, the earth. Whenever I am sad, I come to the desert, with friends, not tourists. We stay for days and nights. We drink tea and Coke, and sometimes cry.”

In his wanderings and workings, he had dealt with many tourists from the Islands of Japan, and he showed us an impression of the Nipponese that I will endeavor to transcribe:

“’Ohhh,’” he began. “’I am from Japanese. How motch for des-sert tour, kudasai.’ Five hundred. ‘Prease, wait, matte kudasai.’” (He mimed using a calculator watch, then he writhed as if in mental anguish. “’Ohhh, ohhh—takai desu! Too much. Prease, student discount.’ Four hundred fifty. ‘Ohhh, ohhh, sank you, sank you, arigato gozaimasu—hai, hai.’”

The Koreans shared the tequila and beer they had the foresight to bring, and Mahmoud lit a small shisha with coals from the fire. The wood had burned out and the red coals were scattered in the sand like stars. Jean and I took a walk up to the dune’s slithering apex, and along it to scrabble drunkenly up some rocks to the top of a cracked peak. From there we could survey all the wonders of the landscape by the light of the moon.

Day 2: Hamad and Mahmoud the Lesser played a trick on our Sheikh the next day. They flicked off his four-wheel drive so that when he started, he spun out in the sand. They got out to laugh at their master, though the passengers who had switched cars to escape from Mahmoud the Lesser’s inexpertise were not humored when they found themselves again pushing a jeep from the sandbox.

Hamad and the Koreans left for a longer tour, reducing our convoy to two vehicles as we proceeded through the White Desert and into the forest of mushroom rocks that the Bedouin call Aish el-Ghorab. The bases of the stones have been sandblasted away over eons, leaving rocks on tiny legs, and strange, extra-terrestrial formations.

“Look,” said Mahmoud the Lesser, “there is a camel!” We saw heads and chickens, and when Yashar, Denniz, and I were riding on top of our jeep, clinging to the empty rack as we sped through the rocks, Mahmoud the Lesser leaned out his window and pointed at something, a rock he titled “Cleopatra on a horse.” Yashar said, “I’m going to need to be on mushrooms to see that.”

We got off the roof at Al-Santa, a 500-year-old acacia tree that has grown in a tangled, solitary way deep in the desert. Next we moved north to the oasis spring at Bir Regwa, the forest divided by fences into little rooms canopied by the arbor, with fire pits and tea pots ready. Jebel al-Cristal (Crystal Mountain) is a hill formed of fake crystalline structures, and while we were peeling off bits of it we saw a giant arachnid, the camel spider. That was where Mahmoud & Mahmoud told us we had to pay additional money for park entrance fees.

The convoy stopped at a hot spring for bathing and a late lunch. The sulfuric mineral water, opaque and aquamarine, fed a steaming concrete pool, and drained on the other side into a aquaduct that led out to the fields. We swam in it and splashed around until the food was ready.

Back in Bawiti, there was cause for alarm when Mahmoud the Greater told us our 300 pounds only covered one night, and he would need 50 pounds for a second. Yashar said he could not remember what he had agreed on. We all entered varying states of anger and dismay, and sat there for long periods of awkward silence, spent staring intently at points on the carpeted floor of Mahmoud the Lesser’s dwelling, while we waited for the supper his wife was preparing. I was of a mind to pay less than we agreed on and go to a hotel, but Denniz’s cooler head prevailed. The Dane assured Mahmoud the Greater with platitudes and negotiated a second night, close to the oasis, for 25 pounds more.

Mahmoud the Lesser served us massive plates of rice and noodles and bread and beans. We thanked the chef through the husband. (Amelia reported from the kitchen all the abuses the women railed at their husband, who deflated like a squeezed sponge under them.) As per the terms of our renegotiated contract, we would only take one jeep out to our campsite that night. Four crammed in the back, two on the passenger’s seat, and Mahmoud the Lesser drove us a short ways out of Bawiti to a fenced enclosure with two yurts and a fire pit at the edge of the palm groves. We set out carpets in one of the yurts and mattresses around the fire, and sat there enjoying the cool night.

There was a story in Bahariyya that six years before, the largest skeleton of a dinosaur ever discovered was found in the Oasis. Americans funded the paleontological project, and Germans dug up the bones; but when the Egyptian laborers found out that the Americans would be taking the skeleton home, they stole and hid two of the largest bones. Mahmoud had worked on the project, and when we asked if he knew where the bones were hid, he only showed us a sly grin.

We had to get up early the next morning to take Yashar back into town for a 6:30 bus to Cairo, so he could catch his flight to Morocco that afternoon. “When I do not get enough sleep,” said Mahmoud, “people ask me, ‘What is wrong with you? You seem different than before. Are you angry?’”

Yashar received our farewells, a sadness for Denniz especially. The two had first met on a Couchsurfing road trip out of Aleppo, and despite being complete opposites had formed a connection on the strength of similarities, both their fathers being refugees, from Turkey and from Iran. They had run into each other regularly on the road south—but no longer, since they would be on different continents. “Or,” said Denniz, “maybe you’ll get home for Christmas, and I’ll be having tea with your mom. Surprise!” Yashar went to the bus station, and we went to Popular Restaurant to drink coffee until the sun rose. The rest of us had decided to continue on through the desert to Luxor.

From the roof of a building across the street from Mahmoud the Lesser’s house, you could see the whole spread of the Bahariyya Oasis. It was no mean thing, no little puddle ringed by palms like the columns of some Hellenic dome, but a vast island of densely cultivated forest in a sea of sand. Our vantage looked over the verdant and jagged roof of this hall, the date-bearing, orange-growing canopy, and toward the dry, sandy hills on the far side.

Our bus to Dakhla Oasis left around noon, and in the time we had, our band walked down to a grotto in the jungle of the palm grove. The stream that ran through it was clouded with minerals. We talked about the difference between a sleaze and a slime, and explained to Sven that he could call a girl easy-going, but he shouldn’t call her easy. Denniz’s mom was in the hospital with meningitis, and he went back to check his e-mail for news. Amelia went with him, and Jean, Sven, and I continued deeper into the oasis.

We walked under the date palms and orange trees, between the fences and streams, until we were well lost, and then turned back into a field full of newborn butterflies. A white egret landed and strutted around the place, picking for worms. “What do you miss from back home?” asked Sven. “Food,” said Jean and I, though we later added other things worth missing. We got to talking about separation, and how it is to reconnect with friends on a return.

“I’m gone six months,” said Jean, “and that’s a long time, but fifteen months? You go home, and what do you have to talk about? Your friends have had jobs, some of them have had children, they have done lots of things, without you. And you, you have been doing crazy things, going all over the desert and to Pyramids and India. Do you just tell them what happened, and then it is like before?”

“Yes, I experience that, too,” said Sven. “When I go home after my ozzer trip, the one-year one, I feel like I am different. My friends zay I am stranger to zem. I feel very—what is the word?—disconnected?”

When we eventually found our way back into the town, and after we had eaten a breakfast of rice, potato stew, and pickled vegetables at Popular Restaurant, and had moved to the bus station to wait for our coach, I asked Amelia about it. She said, “You change, but, well, you’re still the same person. Your character is still the same. It’s just what you’re into that changes. I’m into travel and seeing live bands, and I have friends who aren’t at all. I have friends who are into very different things, but we can always get together for dinner and a beer.”

The desert between Bahariyya and Dakhla looked like a construction zone or a parking lot at a fairgrounds, with trees and stone pillars on the horizons. Past the small, dusty Farafra Oasis, the bus rode down around a sand sea, vast and flat. Sprinklers sprayed water over the rebellious parcels of green that disturbed the contemplative monotony. We passed through another small oasis, and then down onto the waste, and through it to the oasis.

We arrived in Al-Qasr after dark, but just in front of the Tourist Rest House, the only hotel in that small town. Our caretaker Mohammed had a reputation as an upright, trustworthy sort of chap. He set us up in two rooms around a lounge on the second floor. There was a sort of veranda outside on the stairway with a picnic table, and the stairs went up to the roof, where we sat for the large dinner that Mohammed served—great tubs of rice and boiled things. The abolition of hunger ceases all discourse.

Al-Qasr is an old city, and the next morning we investigated its oldest part. A mudbrick minaret, 800 years old, stands as dilapidated watcher over the entrance. There a man in a blue robe and white turban met us and led us on through a maze of crumbling and roofless buildings, shaded by the three story walls and high bridges of bisected palm trunks. The slim windows had posts in them like prison bars. The dusty air had a stale, sour quality, as if the same air had been current since the city’s ancient founding. Few people still lived there.

At the Madrasa Court we found stairs up to the rooftop, as dusty as the road, and it sagged like a trampoline under our weight. In courtyards off the main road, our guide showed us an olive press and a filter for oil, and a grain mill to grind flour—all bound from branches and metal and stone. He walked us to the entrance and we paid him his due backsheesh.

The Rest House is the only place to eat in Al-Qasr, so we took our lunch there, then hired a car out to one of the hot springs. The water that bubbled out of the ground into a concrete cistern, then down into a second cistern and out into the soil. It was smaller than the one in the White Desert but much hotter; it took a while and a slow entry to adjust to the heat. Palm bushes fenced one side in and the dirt road ran along the other, looking over a fallow grain field.

Two boys rode up on a donkey cart and stared at us, slowly moving closer until I got them to pose for a picture. More people trickled closer, until there was a scattered crowd of them milling about in robes, waiting for the Westerners and the White Woman to leave so they could partake in an after-work bath. Amelia wore a black T-shirt over her swimmers out of modesty but could not help attracting attention.

While the others were drying off, I went over to the two boys, who were climbing all over their donkey cart, to ask them how much it would be to Al-Qasr. Five pounds, they said, and we shook hands. Somehow we loaded the four of us in the back of the donkey cart, putting our weight over the wheel so as not to overburden the beast or tip its carriage, and the two boys sat on the frame whacking the donkey with a stick. We felt bad for it, so we got out where the road to the spring rejoined the highway and walked back the last ten minutes.

Denniz had caught some cold or flu bug and stayed behind to rest. He felt a little better when we returned. Sven and I were hard into a chess game on the roof when Denniz arrived with a backgammon board tucked under his arm to challenge Amelia. His Turkish father had made him familiar with every aspect of the game.

“The Western ones are all padded, but they make the boards out of wood for a reason. You’re supposed to slam the piece down, to make a noise,” he said. “There’s tactics, but there’s only so much you can do. At a certain point, it’s all about the dice roll. You have to take risks, and then hope for the roll you need. It’s about taunting.”

He blew on the dice, slammed down pieces, and laughed maniacally. When Amelia lost her third game in a row, he told her, “Put the board under your arm. Now, kum parğına git!” — Get to the playground!

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

We waited morbidly in the Seven Heaven lounge, morbid because we were finally about to leave after a three week stay, and because the road to Cairo put us one step closer to inevitable separation.

My arm still hurt from Richie of New Zealand’s Tae Kwon Do twist. The lanky second-degree blackbelt, third in the world in the senior division before he discovered alcohol, had been drunk when he showed me some holds. He taught English in Liepzig and regularly patroned the English pub there for rugby matches up until a few months ago, when he came to Dahab and got a job in the Seven Heaven dive shop.

“Glory?” scoffed the Kiwi, swinging his leg around in the air to show a power move. “There’s no such thing as glory. It’s all ego, mate.”

While Jean attended his Facebook, Amelia and I listened to a wild tale from Maria of Denmark, which I will here relate. Maria first arrived in Dahab four months before, for a short beach vacation to precede her Arabic course in Alexandria, with a glowing Norwegian girl in tow. They met a Kiwi with an Egyptian friend, and the four of them went together to one of the cafes on the esplanade for drinks. After, the Norwegian girl rose to freshen up; the Egyptian got up moments later, to make sure she found the bathroom; and when the girl returned, it was with a disheveled outfit and a tortured countenance.

“He tried to rape me,” she said. The Egyptian had pushed her into a stall and pulled at her clothes, but the Norwegian pushed free and did not know what to do. Maria and the Kiwi started walking the girl back to the hotel, and the Kiwi worked himself into a fury at his acquaintance until he said, “I’m going to knock him out,” and turned back towards the restaurant. The Scandinavians continued on to the hotel, and Norway broke down in the courtyard, sobbing and screaming. Maria lay her down on the bed, and Norway would sleep and wake and scream and sleep again.

They called a doctor, who ruffled his robe very officiously and said, “She needs to be told to calm down, that everything will be okay.” Maria shouted, “No, she doesn’t! Give her something!” then shouted, “What are you giving her?” and took morphine and vicodin out of the prescribed cocktail. When the girl was asleep, Maria went to find out about the Kiwi, who had laid out the Egyptian on the floor of the cafe and made their case look very silly.

The next morning at 9, Maria and Norway went to the police station. They sat around all day doing paperwork and describing the event. “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” said the policemen. “I can understand you!” said Maria in Arabic. “Oh, well, I was talking about someone else.” The girls identified the accused local face to face and left the station at 11 that night. A trial date was set for a few days later.

In the following days, people came up to them, strangers in the streets and in restaurants, staff at their hotel, and said, “Sign the peace treaty.” “The what?” “Sign the peace treaty. He is a young man. He has a sick mother and a family. Who will take care of his children if he is in prison. Sign the peace treaty!” “It’s not our fault he did what he did,” said the girls. “He knew what the consequences would be when he tried to commit the crime.”

But the Scandinavians asked about this peace treaty and could not get a straight answer. The police said it would call off the trial and put the Egyptian in jail for three months. Locals said it would save his family from poverty. Finally, a hotel manager told them, “No, if you sign the treaty, it will cancel all charges. He will go free. And, he will be able to take you to court for all the money he lost not working while the police held him.”

On learning this, the Norwegian decided not to sign the treaty, yet her problems had not ended. In the courtroom, the defense attorneys asked her every sort of question about the bathroom. How many stalls were there? What color was the door, and what did the sink look like? Ad nauseum. Any mistakes in descriptions were duly noted. (“Jesus,” said Amelia. “I’m going to start keeping track of everything when I go to the bathroom.” “I already do,” said Maria.) The Egyptian paraded his family around and begged for mercy, on his mother’s behalf.

Nevertheless, after a long and trying process, the man was sentenced to a few months in jail—justice served against horrifying odds.

We got in at 7, and a hastily arranged taxi took us past new mosques and hotels and through an ancient cemetery of desiccated domes, like some ruined city in India. The streets were silent, but the driver warned that in an hour they would be full. He dropped us off at the Ismaelia House, a hotel on the eighth floor of a building across Midan Tahrir from the American University of Cairo and within sight of the pink palace of the Egyptian Museum, abutting the Nile. The rickety free-hanging elevator spilled us out, and we met Yashar, who had recommended the place and was on his last day there, checked into the gender-segregated dorm rooms, and looked out at the city from a balcony.

Cairo has a thousand minarets. It’s rooftops, bedecked with rubble and old furniture and satellite dishes and billboards, recede into the smoggy infinite like the waves of the sea. The stale, cracked tan, the colonial craftsmanship, and the Islamic artistry of its buildings gives the impression of some artifact purchased in a far off port of call and left to gather dust on grandfather’s shelf—something of inner beauty, exotic mystique, and tacky ugliness.

It toiled to life like a newborn. Immediately below our balcony, a ful stand and a felafel one served their fare to Egyptians who stood eating around tables between the cars parked in the alley. The felafel came in newspaper, the ful in metal bowls. People boiled out of the buildings, and the streets became like arteries. The flow of traffic generated a consistent blare of horns, used on Cairo’s lawless streets like reverse sonar, to let everyone else know where you were. The cries of humanity drown you, and the songs of the minarets are beautiful, for only the best can sing here. Otherwise it would be a constant drone.

Amelia fell asleep in a curl on the couch, Yashar had business at the post office and train station, and Jean and I ventured out into the young and polluted sunlight. We asked at the American University for TEFL courses and walked up streets north of the Museum. We saw strange things: troves of old Peugeots, motorbikes with side cars, a camel tied up between the fruit stalls and those selling old Iraqi banknotes and loudspeakers and other random things; boats parked in the street, a synagogue under guard, a basilica under construction; and always that constant press of humanity, which by its multitudinous activity diminishes the individual. I felt as if I was moving in slow motion, and all the trackless others at full speed. It was strange and surprising and exhaustive.

In Cairo, 20 million people need jobs to support them. Walk into an empty bakery in the early morning and see a mass of employed inefficiency. Behind each dish of sweets and savories stands an attendant, and in between them a man takes payment and gives you a token to be redeemed by the server two feet away. Finally, a woman stands by the door, with the sole duty of opening it for you. They earn nothing and are expendable. They are Cairenes.

We found our way back to Ismailia House and woke Amelia, who came with us to the street food stalls for lunch. Egyptians are generally a warm, energetic, friendly people, as extroverted as they are self-conscious. Outside of the country’s many tourist trips, where touts sharpen their fangs on the bones of a globetrotters, the locals help you for nothing and crowd about you as they would a marvel. Few tourists travel Egypt on their own, and those who do are rewarded.

Amelia rode with us on the Metro, south to Mar Girgis, and not on the woman’s carriage. We arrived in the Coptic Quarter and went into the wide courts of St. George’s Cathedral. “This is not what I expected to see on my first day in Cairo,” said Amelia. Greek lettering and candles marked the Orthodox icons. Beneath the chapel were relics of George’s torture. A little girl was wrapped up in his chains and asleep. Some of the tombs in the somber Coptic cemetery were broken, and we wondered if it was grave-robbers.

In the maze behind the cathedral, we went into the Church of St. Sergius, its ceiling built like Noah’s Ark. The synagogue had a metal detector at the door, and the guard asked, “Do you have any bombs?” The Hanging Church is the holiest Coptic site—a shrine built on two pillars without a foundation, on one of the resting places of the Holy Family in their flight from Herod.

Leaving the walls of Old Cairo we went up into the warren between it and our House. Children playing football kicked the ball our way and mobbed us. They were only ten but sweet talked Amelia—“You are beautiful. Take off your glasses. Oh! Your eyes!” The streets were made of dust, and from up ahead came a thump of bass and music. A group of Egyptians were loading suitcases onto trucks and dancing.

Women howled when they saw us. Jean started recording wildly on his camcorder, and a boy came up to Amelia and I and rubbed a stick on his finger. When I did not understand, he grabbed me and took me back into a red room with an open wall and two billiards tables and a dozen boys. They challenged me to pool, and I am grateful that Jean showed up since otherwise we wouldn’t have won. Everyone clapped and cried out at the click of the billiard balls. An old fat man came in near the end and started shouting at the boys, who backed away from the table to give us room.

When we won, they cried, “Money, money, money!” with hands outstretched, and we left through the gaping wall. We kept on north through the slums, up through a wall and onto the busy river of a highway, crossed like in Frogger, then back down through another wall into a new ghetto of auto-repair shops and markets. The meat market stretched before us, for miles. Let me describe it:

Herds of sheep waited for the slaughter behind the dead, stripped corpses of their brothers. They wear painted marks on their backs. Cows were tied to the posts of fences. Id al-Adha was four days away, and everyone needed a sacrifice. They loaded sheep into the backs of trucks or cars or taxis. How much does fare for a sheep cost? we wondered. We navigated the stalls, stepped over the puddles of dubious providence, avoided the constant traffic of cars and people—sometimes missing an accident by the twist of an ankle away from crushing wheels, the swivel of hips from a scything side mirror—and gazed in gruesome wonder.

There were lines of carts, and each held a different body part in a pile: camel legs, cow livers, sheep heads, anything you could think of. Some stalls were set up like circus tents, all bright colors and lights and mutilation. One had an announcer on a wooden stage, and he shouted, “Hey! Hey! America!” when he saw us. Someone in black pushed his way past us, with a train of stick-wielding vigilantes in hot pursuit. There was a fight ahead. Amelia and I kept losing Jean, who was taking too many photos. We found, at length, a subway, and pressed into it like sardines to get home.

Yashar was asleep on a couch when we got back. Cairo is exhaustive, but he loved the city. He described it as “a constant heart-attack” and a “28-hour a day city.” Amelia went to bed, and Jean and I went with Yashar to Felfela, a popular Egyptian restaurant with a sit-down area for foreigners and tourists and a fast-food standing area for locals, which costs half as much. Yashar entertained us with energetic stories, as Jean ate chicken and I stuffed pigeon. Yashar left that night for two days in Luxor and two in Aswan, and then he would return and go with us into the Western Desert. Alright, we said.

After Yashar had boarded the metro to the train station, we met Daniel of Perth in the hotel and settled for tea and shisha at a place on the side of the street. The Aussie had come to Cairo from Dahab the same night as us, but because he had not bought his ticket beforehand, he had to more or less bribe his way onto the 1:30 bus, to the seat next to the driver. He had seen the Pyramids and the Souq and would fly home the next day. It was the penultimate day of a year-long trip, a fact his mind was just beginning to understand. Since Amelia was not there, we talked about helicopter blades and George Lucas.

We slept in the next day, and set off late to visit the oldest Islamic districts and the Khan Al-Khalili Bazaar. Our cab let us off outside the Al-Azhar Mosque, one of the open enclaves of clear-headed tranquility in cluttered Cairo.

The caretaker of the mosque, a compact and energetic-looking man, asked us where we were from. “France.” “Australia.” “Germany.” “Ah,” he said. “Alemania! Come, Hans Christian. Good no Americans!” “I’m from America,” said a voice determined to be heard. “Oh, well, Obama?” “Yeah.” “Obama good, Bush bad,” said the Muezzin. He mimed spitting on the floor of his mosque. An earthquake had come close to destroying the building in the last decade; many countries donated money for its restoration, but—“America does not. Iraq, Afghanistan!” He could not find the English words, so he mimed a sort of weapons, with spit for bullets.

The Muezzin gave some defensive religious books to Amelia, who had her scarf tied over her head. He gave a pamphlet in Chinese to Jean. When I tried to look, he pushed me apart and said, “They are for her!” He showed us the Madrasa for the blind and the tomb in the back, a service for which we refused to make donations, and so he sent us out with a curse: “No Americans come here! No Americans!” He refused to take his books back, but his anger echoed down the long stone galley as we put our shoes back on. I looked at Amelia’s books on the stairs outside, but the Muezzin appeared like a goblin behind us and snatched them away. “No books!” he said. It was the first time in the Middle East anyone had treated me poorly for being American.

We crossed under the street and entered a medieval world. The roads twisted through narrow tinkling warrens of silver and goldsmiths and jewelers and watchmakers, through filthy side streets where pedestrians with bags or baskets of bread balanced on their heads walked across gaping holes on the exposed pipes, like the obscure remnants of some ancient empire in the midst of all those ancient customs and old buildings. We sat on seats against a mosque and drank tea as we watched them pass. Blacksmiths pounded on metal plates or ground hooka stems on wheels or welded in the street. Most of the work of stalls spilled into the road, so there was chaos.

The main artery from the southern gateway to the northern wall of the Souq was cobbled and lined with beautiful mosques, which at night lit up in mild and warm colors. They bear the names of heroes: An-Nasir Mohammed, Al-Hakim, Qalaun, and Al-Ghouri. Inside they were beautiful, and we listened to the muezzin sing the call to prayer. We ate in the streets, and I tried some strange desert of couscous and powdered sugar, a cousin of the rice pudding that Egypt loves.

We ate more in the new marketplace across from the Khan Al-Khalili Bazaar, where locals shop for clothes and car parts and meat and anything else they need. We bought oven-roasted yams from a street vendor and koshary cups from a cafe, and ate them on the steps of a huge mosque. We felt very anxious eating there, but an imam came out to offer us napkins and a rubbish bin. The taxi back to Ismaelia House took longer than walking. Woe to the Cairene drivers!

The next stop on our flash flood tour of the Land of the Nile was the Egyptian Museum, a pink-stained warehouse of antiquities near the river.

“Everyone says we should get a guide,” said Sven when we were standing in the courtyard the next morning, along with Jyunko, a hair-dresser from Tokyo. “It’s a very confusing museum, and a guide is only one hundred pounds—that’s twenty each,” he continued. A stunned silence! “Just look at their faces,” said Jean of Amelia and my phrenologies,—“They never spend money on anything, they’re so cheap.” I apologized for the virtue of thriftiness, though inwardly I thanked it. Plenty is a wonderful word that can make life dull.

We wandered around looking at the old things. The artistry present in those rocks, from an age when the Greeks and Romans and Europeans yet dwelled in huts and caves, had Jean speaking of alien origins. Jean and Sven paid 200 extra pounds to see the mummies of Rameses II and other heroes, and Amelia, Jyunko, and I went around to see the gold of Tutankhamen and the wonders of his tomb.

Waiting outside for our friends, Amelia bet me that Jean would come out raving about the mummies, and I bet that he would be disappointed because of the heavy cost—a Pyrrhic victory brings no joy to the general! We bet a hand massage, (Jean once had a Colombian girlfriend who taught him, among other things, the means of massaging hands and heads; Jean showed these techniques to Amelia, who taught them to me) which is a better bet than money or the slap-bets described by Daniel of Perth. “It has to be the first words out of his mouth, though,” said Amelia.

Jean’s first words: “Yeah, it was awesome. You would have been disappointed, though.” It was contestable, but I agreed to pay up in the end.

On our way to Felfela for koshary, we ran into Bernard of Amsterdam, the Dutch troubadour. He was a skinny young man of Nordic features with a wispy goatee and long hair who had been sick when we left him in Dahab and now looked better, though exhausted as could be expected after a day spent seeing the Pyramids and the Museum. Like Daniel, Bernard had only one day in Cairo.

Jean, Sven, and I met him later under our building to get tea and shisha. We grabbed some more rice pudding at Felfela, picked up a South African from Praetoria who was there by himself, then went up to the Tawfiqiyya Souq, which deals in produce and auto parts. We turned left into the first alley, stepped over a pile of cabbages, passed two cows, and found the Sun Restaurant exactly where Yashar had told us it would be. It was a high old building wedged back in a narrow alley, strung with lights and neon, and looked something like a medieval tavern or a western saloon.

We talked about travel, which could sometimes be dangerous, as Maria’s story certifies, “but you’re from South Africa,” I said to the Afrikaner,—“you must have some crazy stories.” Well, he had once been the victim of a gas attack. The burglars had pumped gas through his open window to knock him out, and he woke up on a bare mattress in an empty apartment.

Bernard had to leave the next day, and we told him, “It must suck to go back.”

“Nah,” said the Dutchman. “I have a girlfriend waiting for me, and an okay job. All my friends are there. I wrote a lot of songs while traveling, and I want to try and publish a CD. Life is good.”

“Yeah, I like to travel and all,” said Jean, “but Paris is my home. I have friends there. We’ve been friends for twenty years, some of them. It’s good to see the world, but I want to have, you know, connections.”

“Roots,” said I, I who have traveled but never come home from it.

“Yeah, exactly. It’s important to have roots. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s okay to travel for a few months, even two years, maybe, but all these people who travel for five, ten years—what do they have to go back to? Their friends have moved on. They can’t keep in contact for that long.”

Denniz arrived that night, Yashar’s Danish friend, exhausted after seeing the sunrise on Sinai and leaving Rachel at the border at sunset. His father was a Turk and an exiled communist, who received Swiss, German, and Danish asylum and visas when he showed his own wanted poster to those countries. He fell asleep drunk on a train with some Germans and woke up in the capital of the latter. Soon he met a Danish communista, and soon after Denniz was born. His name means Sea, and his middle name, Göl, means Leg.

As a boy his big ears and wide face earned him a spot in a Danish television ad for frozen chicken. There he was, in the midst of a family enjoying their dinner. He put his glass down on the end of his fork, which catapulted a piece of chicken cradled on the other end straight out the window. The father rose from his seat and dove out the window to grab it. You cannot waste good food!

The Turkish Republic forgave his father’s opinions a few years ago, permitting the family to visit and buy property. Denniz’s grandfather is a content old man who spends his time gardening and cooking at their home on the coast near Izmir. Then the road called Denniz, and he quit a good job at a sports channel, left his slowcore band, the Lightning Choir, and came to Eastern Turkey for a real world education in photography, which lasted through Syria, Jordan, and Israel.

He came with us the next day to see the greatest funeral cairns mankind ever constructed, the oldest and the last standing wonders of the ancient world. Getting there was an ordeal, and the three monstrous stone stacks popped out of the morning smog between buildings to surprise us. From the bus stop we approached them up a long road, past a golf course and tourist shops and a hundred camel touts, and through a ticketed gateway. This opened on the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which stepped up to the sky. Perspective made it look smaller up close than it really was, and still we marveled at it.

People swarmed around it and up the steps to the tomb’s entrance, but we had not paid for tickets. Stray dogs or Bedouin had shat on the pyramid steps, and they slouched around staring with carnivorous intent at the globetrotters that passed, carrion already. In truth, the hassle was not as bad as you might hear, the crowds much smaller than we expected.

We circled Khufu’s Pyramid and the outlying buildings and came to that of Khafre, for which some of us had bought tickets. The ramp led down and straight and back up into a bare and humid chamber with a slanted roof, carved from a single stone. All about the Sphynx that Khafre built, with leftover stone from his cairn, Russian tourists posed as boxers or heavy lifters, and Jean and I joined them in parody—but who can tell the satires from the enthusiasts?

The third Pyramid belonged to Menkaure and was the smallest, though its lower levels were sheathed in unworn granite blocks. Walking through the debris surrounding Menkaure’s tomb, we talked about the aliens that built the structures of Egypt.

“Come on,” said Jean. “Everyone else in the world was building huts and living in caves, and these guys had high art. And look at that: does that look like anything from Earth?”

We crossed a Saharan plain to the sunset panorama, but before the orb had dropped, the policemen informed us that the park was closing early. Denniz checked his calculator watch—the Danish are a nation of niche-dwellers, and Denniz had that timepiece and a vinyl collection—and told us it was only four—but tomorrow was Id al-Adha, so this was like Christmas Eve. The vendors had already packed up their stalls, and all the tourists were gone. We were the last, guided by two police on camels and by a stray dog who took the lead and growled at other strays, and we left singing national anthems: mournful Denmark, bloody France, proud America, and quaint Australia.

That day, I must add, was Thanksgiving, and although such a holiday is not celebrated in Australia, France, Germany, or Denmark, we all celebrated it together. A cart out front sold us yams hot from the oven, and at a restaurant we ordered a feast as close to Thanksgiving as you can get: chicken, salads, fries, spiced tomato slices, tahini sauce, and Arab flatbread. Everyone had something to be thankful for, and I did not feel lonely, even on the other side of the world from where I had always been.

After we had shisha in an alleyway place called Zahred al-Bustan, when we were watching television in the House, my parents called Amelia’s Egyptian number; it was the first time I’d talked to them in a long time—forgive an ungrateful son! I am thankful for your safety and support.

The feast of Id al-Adha marks the beginning of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Good Mohammedans celebrate with a pious feast, and piety requires that the animals be freshly slaughtered. Well off families buy their own goats and sheep and take them home, and wealthier ones send cows into the slums while feasting on delicate kid. So many people, so much meat—the streets run red with blood!

The Turks call it Kurban Bayram, and it is something my friends in Istanbul despise. It colors Istanbul as crimson as the day the Turks took it. Turks in Deutschland carry out their sacrifices in secret, jetting blood into bathtubs and showers to keep the German streets clean and lifeless.

We wished to see some carnage. “I want to see a cow killed,” said Denniz, his Nikon at the ready. A subway took us to the Sayyida Zeinab Mosque, near the meat market and the slums we had explored on our first day in Cairo. The streets were already so stained we feared we had missed the show, but in an alleyway we saw a commotion. A pack of Cairenes were gathered around a convulsing cow with an open neck. Blood pooled around it, and a man hosed everything down. Its rear was brown with feces.

“Allah akbar,” came the gratitude! The crowd was ravenous and ecstatic. The men watched intently, the children in horror, the women out of duty. One girl in a hijab explained the ritual to us, and told us its meaning.

A butcher stood apart from the crowd, near a truck that held two more doltish beasts, chattel for his knives. He wore a white smock stained red, and a belt with a half dozen blades. Six men helped to pull a new beast out from the truck and into the street next to the fallen one. They tied its legs, though it kicked at the thongs, and pushed it spasming onto the ground. Six leaned over it. The butcher drew his poniard and cut the leash. The six held it down and pulled the head back, and the butcher had a machete. He slashed the blade across the throat, quick as a cobra, and blood sprayed across the thrashing flank.

“Allah akbar,” screamed the women. Children shivered and clung to parents, and some looked ready to cry.

The butcher emerged from the pack. He had blood splattered down his smock and across his feral face, and he rinsed it from his mouth at a spigot on the wall and spat in a basin. He laughed, the hero of the day, and wiped his mouth on the gray wool robe of the man next to him. The man smiled, and the butcher laughed again and went back to get the chainsaw.

We left soon after. “Eid sayeed,” we said to those we passed. Sven bought a roasted yam from a street cart, but the rest of us were not very hungry. We retreated into the Mosque. Amelia found the women’s section to be a kind of closet, but the men’s area was a vast enclosure. The faithful were singing around the tomb of Sayyida Zeinab, and the muezzin handed us metal cups with a sweet sanguine drink that we all mistook initially for blood.

Time wasted is existence, used is life.
—Young

Jean pulled his bike up in front of Ali’s Shop and took a seat at a table.

“You’re back,” said Ali.

“Yeah,” said Jean. “How are you? Can I have some lunch?”

Ali served a large plate of mincemeat balls in a thick tomato sauce, and when Jean had finished, he asked, “So what are you doing?”

“Well,” said Jean, “I wanted to get into Egypt, to take the ferry from Aqaba to Nuweiba, to meet my friends. I knew it would be a big hassle. I got to Aqaba but the man told me, ‘It’s very expensive to take your motorbike. I wouldn’t do it.’ I need a report filed back in France, and a deposit in a bank account. I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pay.’ But he told me, ‘I’m not letting your bike on my boat.’ So now I need to find a place to store my bike.”

Ali did not have to think. “Not a problem,” he said easily. “You can store your bike at my house. Some French climbers are keeping their gear there as well.”

Jean trusted the man, had heard his praises from other Frenchmen, and said, “I’ll only be gone two weeks.”

Ali laughed. “Two weeks, a month, it does not matter. I think you will probably stay a month.”

Arab men ask about politics; Arab women ask about family. This husband knew much less English than his wife, and so she turned around in the passenger’s seat of their old Mercedes, which had picked up Amelia and I on the road to Aqaba.

“His father have twenty-three children,” she said. She was a plump, cheerful woman in a hijab, on her way from Ma’an to Aqaba for Sunday shopping. “Have nine wife. He is good. Have one wife. He have more, I—,” and she mimed his murder with a thrashing fist. Her stalwart husband laughed and attended the road. “You are married?”

“No,” we said. “Just friends.”

“Oh. Amelia, you have children?”

“No children.”

“I have three children. One girl, two boy. I expect another boy soon. I do not want twenty-three. Maybe six. How many you want?”

“Mmm,” she said demurely. “One. A girl.”

“Yahyah,” she said to me, “you must have a girl. Amelia, you have love in your heart for Yahyah?”

“Inshallah, habibi.”

“Yahyah, you have love in your heart for Amelia?”

I blushed but laughed and echoed, “Inshallah.”

In Aqaba we found the ferry office, then took a taxi to the port. The one hour ferry across the Gulf of Aqaba to Nuweiba scheduled for noon really left at one. The Princess slogged across the straits, bypassing the Israeli toehold on the Red Sea, and then tread water outside the Egyptian port while the slow ferry from the day before disembarked its passengers, twenty hours after leaving for a three hour tour.

To save time, the Egyptians stamped passports there on the ferry. Most of the passengers were Egyptian, marked by their dark skin, kinky hair, and sallow Berber features, and they lined up behind a little kiosk in the front of the boat, while some prostrated themselves before Mecca even on the moving boat. “How do they know which way to face?” asked Amelia. A guard saw we were white, and he gave us what we needed and took us around the line and the prayerful and had our passports taken, to be returned in the port after we payed for a visa. We shrugged and sat down and whiled away a few hours. The crowd grew anxious looking out the window.

Announcements in Arabic interrupted a marathon of music videos of pop sensation Elissa (lucky us—Jean had to watch Egyptian snuff torture movies). We got up, sheep to the mob, and moshed back towards the exit. Guards told all to sit, and six senior whites pushed through the parted crowd with roller bags in tow. “Follow them,” said Amelia and I to each other. We tagged behind, along with a few other Whites and an Asian traveler, into a back room near the exit, where another guard told us to sit down. Outside the Egyptian crowd was riling itself into a lynching frenzy at this segregation, and they glared venom in through the door before a guard slammed it shut. We heard them shouting terribly as a security officer entered and had his noble picture taken with one of the tourists. Sometimes the door would open to worry and shame us with their maddened faces.

Soon we descended and followed the mob through a pyramid that said, “Welcome to Egypt,” inside, and onto a bus that took us 500 meters into a wild courtyard. A hundred coolies bustled carts of luggage around and screamed at each other and us. In a tranquil shack that said BANK on the front we bought visas for 11 Jordanian dinars, and we went around the corner into an office to retrieve our passports, praise Allah for their safe delivery, and have them stickered and stamped by a grinning and corpulent official. While waiting we met two Czechs and a Dutchman and Jordanian also heading up the beach to the campsites. The Jordanian took it upon himself to guide us all.

The outdoor courtyard was ravaged but vacant in the early dusk; its bustle had moved into a warehouse with a single working X-ray. We pushed between the howling Egyptians and their colorful cloth bags, stuffed big as two of the coolies put together, and put our bags on the conveyor between pieces of a man’s furniture set. As we picked them up, he was trying to shove a loveseat into the machine, and everyone was trying to help by pushing on it or shouting advice from a circle of spectators.

The Jordanian found us a young Bedouin taxi driver in robe and turban, who led us into a van and insisted that we get inside before agreeing on a price, lest the police assault him for haggling with tourists. Like most Egyptians, he drove with the headlights off, to save petrol. His haggling more than matched the Jordanian’s, and we did not hear a price until we payed. The Bedouin wanted $30 to take us out to Sawa, the campsite at the end of the strip where Skip was staying, and though we pushed this down to $15, it was still too much for Amelia and me, who got out with the Dutchman and Jordanian at a nice hotel, with a lobby of teak and leather and earthy brown tiles and cool-lighting.

We followed the owner around for a sampling of the rich lifestyle—comfortable lounge chairs, fruit cocktails, snorkeling gear for the nearby reef, a pair of lesbians studying some modern dance on a projector screen—and said, It’s very nice, and we are very poor. Down the way we found a cheaper hotel, and further down the beach a place called Sababa with $4-per-night reed huts that were more our style. A place to rest our weary feet, cracked by the desert dryness; our empty wallets, spilled into the tourist soil, where so much blood has been spilled before.

Nuweiba was an ideal place to begin our ensuing lethargy. Small hotels and resorts stretched along the strand in all directions, all as empty as ours. Sababa Camp had rows of huts with fans and beds and mosquito nets inside. The covered lounge had a bar and a stereo and squares of floor-level cushions for couches, and outside across a path of sand was a shelter just alongside the lapping water, with more couches and tables. A reef kept the water shallow, but it was beautiful and warm.

Amelia and I were nearly alone. The Sababa staffers were too high on hash to care much, although they had a young puppy that rolled all over us. There was an Egyptian with his French girlfriend. An Israeli couple was staying there, but they left the morning after we arrived, and left us a joint in exchange for checking the weather on my laptop. The wadis were flooding, and it would be a difficult road.

Egypt was the first Arab state to accept peace with Israel—Jordan is the only other—and is ostracized by the region’s regimes that take legitimacy from that conflict. Until the treaty, Sinai was in the hands of the Israelis, who say they did not develop the Red Sea coast because they knew they would give it back—though the Bedouin laugh at this. One condition of the peace was that fifteen-day Sinai visas are free, and up until a bombing a few years ago, Israel was the nation best represented on the beach.

Our first full day there was very empty and relaxing. We sat around the shelter on the beach, ate bananas and yogurt, read, swam, played backgammon, and tried to contact Jean or Skip. Jean finally arrived at 9 that night, and we put together a salad and enjoyed the cool of evening and the full moon.

Our reunion offered an excuse to sit around for a second day: swimming, reading, and laundering. The dust of the desert was part of our clothes, and it turned the basin water brown. We were the only ones in Sababa. The stoned bartender turned on a full five hours of Yanni music, so we swapped in an iPod and played Sunny Ade and Toots and the Maytals. Jean took us down the strand to Soft Beach, where a French couple he had met was staying, and Amelia and I sat on the sidelines while he told stories in his native tongue. Listening to a story you know told in another language is intoxicating.

Wednesday we took a taxi into the desolation of Nuweiba City and, as there were no buses, bargained a ride to Dahab down to $7 a head, though the driver took a friend and stopped to get German pamphlets in a Bedouin town called Bir Israel. We drank tea with them on a shaded porch. Children peeked around the buildings, an an old mother laid out what jewelry and trinkets she had to sell.

Dahab lined the arch of the coast with tourist spots, like a lacy fringe between the bleak desert of Sinai and the calm blue of the Gulf of Aqaba, between the hot sun and the cool sound of beating waves. The cafes had couches on the floor with colored pillows under a thin roof of reeds or umbrellas, and padded lawn chairs out in the sun. They all played the same music, and the hawkers said the same thing. “Hey, you want drink? Happy hour!” Cats with long Egyptian features wandered through, and we scratched their backs.

Most cafes were around Banner Fish Bay. South they dwindled out into construction projects and ghost villas, all the way to the blue lagoon. North were resorts all the way to Blue Hole, a hundred meter deep dive mecca. Lonely Planet recommended Seven Heaven, and we followed the Bible because we were cheap—nay, faithful! though these are often the same. The roof, three stories up, had a line of rooms like garden sheds that were $4 a night, and the restaurant had good deals on big meals. The showers sometimes had hot water, which emerged in a drip; the beds had bed bugs that left trails of red welts wherever they drank, and they seemed to prefer my blood to others’.

We sat down in a bar called Friends for tea and shisha, and saw in the street the fighting Spaniard who we met in Petra showed up that first night. He and an obnoxious American joined our table to complain about the Israeli border crossing. You see, Jean’s ferry from Aqaba was canceled at some point, and the Spaniard and the rest of his group went to take a bus across the Israeli finger on the Red Sea, a route with a heap of trouble. Jean waited with a French couple who were having their exit visas revoked, and while waiting heard that the ferry cancellation was canceled.

Bedouin girls with covered heads came around selling tassels of colored thread. One annoyed us with how funny she was, and any endearing qualities lent themselves to her business acumen. She had a happy cherub face, and said, “Buy one. Buy five. Five for twenty. Come on, you need them.” The American kept offering to buy her beer and said, “I’ll buy one if you take your headscarf off.” Amelia had her sit on the couch and showed her how to braid hair, though the girl tugged painfully at it and was hopelessly inept. I bought one of her tassels, and she got it in her mind that I had stolen another. She called me a thief and threatened to stab Jean in the back several times before she found the missing ornament under a cushion.

We started talking about Michael J. Fox after the girl had left. His condition was tragic, but, “He married a fox,” said Amelia.

“What?” cried Jean. “He married his cousin or something?”

The next morning Jean came running back into the room and said, “Hey I ran into this Japanese girl. I met her in Venizia Hotel, in Amman. She’s taking SCUBA lessons, and she got me a good deal. I’m taking SCUBA lessons.” He grabbed some things and left.

Amelia and I shrugged and got up an hour later. Time in Dahab gently dawdles forward, as it did in Ohrid or in the Garden of Eden; for eighteen days we were there. We were downstairs in the restaurant by noon and lounged patiently around one of the three low tables against the windows until Mohammed came to us. “Two Turkish coffees,” he said. He knew I would order a Spanish omelet and Amelia the English breakfast, but he let us order them ourselves anyway.

Jean’s class lasted a week, and by the end he would be a certified advanced diver. He would dive down thirty meters to the HMS Thistlegorm, a British transport ship sunk during World War Two, along with its load of motorcycles, tanks, jeeps, a railroad engines, and leather shoes. The dive-bomber thank sank her was shot down, and lies on the flat, shallow grave of the sea floor a few hundred yards away. “It’s one of my dreams to do this,” said the Frenchman.

Amelia and I could not help but be unenvious, though we appreciated the excuse offered by Jean’s quest, to stay in Dahab and wait for him. We sunbathed in one of the cafes around the bay. The water crowded with SCUBA divers and snorkelers on the calm days, and on the windy ones with windsurfers and kitesurfers who jumped and sailed. We went to the azure lagoon and swam, and sat in the dust to watch the windsurfers practice on the bend in the coast, and looked up on the barren ramparts of Sinai and the sky that watched over the Exodus. We snorkeled off the coast and saw confetti-colored reefs, partially bleached by sun and chemicals, and aquatic schools and lone wolf fish with rainbow scales and strange features. The rolling shimmer of the sea let in rays of light that glittered off the dim coral.

We went and sat down on the carpeted cushions in a restaurant called Sphinx, overlooking the still shallows, and the waiter said, “Jug beer? Shisha?” since that’s what we always ordered. There was a felafel shop on a side street, and a bookstore and fruit stand. At King Chicken you could get a half a bird with rice, salad, pickled vegetables, potatoes and gravy, baked beans, tahina, and bread for about $4. We smuggled $3 vodka into restaurants and mixed it into fruit drinks. We watched movies on my laptop, and sought out free Wi-Fi and cheap beer.

At night a gang of us walked up the arcade and talked to the street hawkers to see what kind of deals we could get. It was off-season, and everyone was offering something. A place called Friends had a cool, multicolored, tasseled atmosphere, and they played more than Bob Marley and Tracey Chapman—usually afrobeat or chillout music. They knew us there and always gave us a good bargain.

During the day we set goals for ourselves: buy fruit, get a haircut, mail that package. Sometimes, we accomplished one. Amelia sat in a chair while a barber went to work shaving off a month’s mane and trimming my beard with a folding razor. He held the blade in front of my face and said, “See my hand? It shakes,”—laughing, razor at my throat—“How much you like your boyfriend?”

Jean was around only a little. We saw him in the lounge, working furiously with a French diver’s manual with his dive partner Yui. Her career ended when its intensity contributed to a mental breakdown and she realized that life is more than advancement. She travels to France to learn French and hopes to dive off the coast of Yakushima, the smokey, forested island that inspired the western wilds of Miyazaki’s Mononoke-hime, when she works there next year. She could fold her eyelids inside out and twist her tongue around. She shared movies with us and showed us pictures she took, and she joined in a massage train we started one night in the restaurant with a Portuguese guy.

The world is small, the Middle East smaller, and people usually run into each other. Keith arrived soon after us, and we met him at Sphinx for beer and shisha and went to a chicken place for dinner. He had gone through Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and told us crazy stories of Hebron and Jericho and Jerusalem, which got Jean and I into a big argument about whether it was right for young women of Israel to deal with Arab elders who considered interaction with women to be disgraceful. The Kiwi left the next day, his trip faster than ours.

And one day Adam Leo popped his head through the window and said, “Hey! What was your name again?” I met this Aussie in Rhodes, the Reader may remember, and since then he had traveled to France, picked up a Parisian girl, and came to Egypt.

Seven Heaven hosted as interesting a cast of characters as any hotel I’ve stayed at—Danes and Brisbaners and Nipponese, Tae Kwon Do champions and optometrist dive masters and Dutch singer-songwriters—but we held true to our own. Amelia and I felt out of place among the divers, and bashfully answered, “No, we are not doing a SCUBA course, and yes, we have been here a long time.” They say that three is company.

We were as dependent on each other as we had been autonomous when traveling alone. We knew the asymmetries of each others faces and grew used to each others ticks. Amelia’s lips pursed rampantly and she made a gentle hmmm when she thought, and she rubbed her feet together. Jean had a habit of making a French poot noise and saying, “Forget about it,” a phrase gleaned from Donnie Brasco. I emitted a hoarse ahhh when confused and said, “Sweet,” when excited, and my eyes were curious and unsubtle. We cultivated inside jokes.

And so we fall into a familiar habit, a Walden Pond state of mind: walking, swimming, thinking, talking, reading, writing, eating, and drinking, in “sublime uneventfulness.”

One night at the Chinese restaurant across the street from Seven Heaven, Amelia and I gorged on noodles and rice and spring rolls and lay back on the cushioned palette while I sipped the rest of my beer. There’s something to be said about that eastern style of eating. You eat more and digest better lying on the floor, though you become very lazy, and leave the table only with a tremendous effort.

“Twenties are your best years,” said Amelia, “but I like being thirty a lot more than I thought I would. Before, you care what other people, what strangers think about you, and try to impress them and make them like you. Now I just be who I am. If people don’t like it, then I don’t try to impress them. My friends like me for myself, and know who I am.”

When we came back to Seven Heaven, Jean and Yui were sitting with their chins on their bags and their bags on the diver’s table, waiting for their expedition to the HMS Thistlegorm. Adam was supposed to go with them, but had at the last minute been driven to the hospital, an oxygen mask strapped across his face. “It’s 99.5 per cent sure it’s not decompression sickness,” said Jean, “but it could be. It’s scary, man.”

Adam, we found out after Jean and Yui had taken the plunge, had an amalgam case of exhaustion, the stomach flu, and minor decompression. When Pauline found out, she fainted in the courtyard. When the doctor found out how much medical insurance Adam had, he prescribed a dozen IVs and pill cocktails. When Adam’s insurance found out, they booked Adam and Pauline into a fancy, recuperative hotel. He was back in the Seven Heaven lounge the following day, looking at expensive cameras. “It’s so boring there,” he said. But his hotel had high speed Wi-Fi, and we accepted his invitation to use it.

Unintentionally, our visit intersected a fight between Adam and Pauline, which submerged itself just under the skin at our arrival. He had met Pauline in Paris and invited her to tour the Middle East, without any serious intentions, and now Pauline was, as the Aussies say, cracking the shits. “Why do girls always think that just because you sleep with them, you’re in a relationship?” Adam queried later, when he came alone to Seven Heaven. “Yeah man,” I said. “They’re nuts.”

Yashar showed up that same day, having hitchhiked from the border. “At one point,” he said, “I was totally alone on the highway, no cars in either direction, and I just turned on this Depeche Mode song, Sound of Silence, and danced in the middle of the road.” Amelia met the Iranian-born Canadian in Damascus and Petra, and Jean and I in Dana. He had a good humor and an inexhaustible energy and interest, though he was so tired on arrival that all he wanted to do was drink a beer and scratch a cat he named Mes—My Egyptian Sphinx.

There were a number of cats about Seven Heaven. Black and white Taxi was the only one that Mohammed owned. Two tabby twins were eternally curled up with each other. Mes became a constant and energetic guest, as did a ragged little creature that looked like he had gone through a vacuum cleaner, and which at one point we attempted to save by force feeding with a straw. A huge ginger tomcat attended dinner every once in a while to check on his harem and chase away the odd stray bachelor that wandered in. This Ottoman of the Alleyways did not deign to beg, but sat on the sidelines waiting for an offered meal. He held his tail up high as he passed, and Amelia remarked, “That’s what I don’t like about cats, is that they flash their poop chutes all the time.”

Jean had finished with his program, so went snorkeling with Yashar the next day. His heavy duty camera was waterproof up to 10 meters, and we used it to take a few snapshots. He loved the life of the reef, and soon after he was signed up for a dive course, looking for hash, and courting a Dutch girl.

Yashar’s Danish friend Denniz arrived a few nights later, with a liberal Israeli girl named Rachel, from Tel Aviv. Their relationship was fast as a whirlwind and twice as disorienting, though they both enjoyed it. Yashar and Denniz were both avid Couchsurfers and had met on an organized road trip in Syria. They had a few arcane things in common, a shared interest in photography, and a common itinerary, so that after running into each other repetitively, they agreed to travel together.

My sister was co-hosting a radio show called Common Sense on her university radio station, and she had invited me to call in and share my glorious presence with her. Flush with pride and vodka, I accepted, and at 11 p.m. Cairo time, 1 p.m. Pacific, I connected with KBVR via Yashar’s Skype account. “Hello?” said a voice. “Hi, umm,” began my presence of mind, “I’m calling for Katy McDonald, for Common Sense? I’m her brother?” “Oh,” said the radio. “Katy, it’s your brother. Okay, you’re on the air.” My first line was, “What?”

For my sister, whom I love, I had organized an excellent program. I spoke about the joys of traveling in such a place as Dahab, cheap and warm and interesting. Yashar got on and impersonated an Iranian immigrant: “Hello America! I love Osama, I mean Obama! I am Persian, like the cat. Prrr.” Jean described Eurotrash fashion for my sister’s upcoming birthday bash and sweet talked her in French as I averted a terrible glare. Amelia introduced some fair dinkum Aussie slang and explained some of the ways we passed the lazy days in Dahab, including our recent invention, Waxed & Wasted Wednesdays.

I was vastly hungover the next day. In the wake of my victorious debut, all the weight of vodka hit me like a truck, and I ended up very drunk and pleased with myself. We went out from the hotel courtyard to the arcade to get koshary boxes from a handcart stand there.

Koshary is a wonderful dish which, if served at home, would be taken for leftovers or whatever was left in the fridge. Fried onions and a spicy red sauce is served over macaronis and short noodles, sometimes with mincemeat mixed in. It is, however, delicious, and admirable hangover food. Like most Egyptian food, it is a cheap dish, simple but well-spiced, and served in huge portions. Jean, Amelia, and I ate ours on a concrete wall overlooking Banner Fish Bay, and then went back to Seven Heaven, where I got fried eggs and toast and coffee.

We had planned to leave that day or the next but decided multilaterally to stay when one of the divers, a Danish girl named Maria, proposed going to the Blue Hole site the next morning for some good snorkeling before all the tours arrived. Divers are not creative cartographers in their guileless names. Blue Hole was a circle 100 meters across and 150 deep, formed by a curve of coral on the coast just north of Dahab.

Our group entered at the Hell’s Bells, a fissure that sloped down into the open sea outside of Blue Hole. From the wall the bank fell to 200 meters, and the clear water on that still day cut out to blue at fifty. Looking forward was looking into an empty void, though shafts of light played at the edges of your vision and made it look as a tunnel. Glittering ribbons of fish in their millions traced down the rolling walls of jagged marine life. Larger shapes, pale and indiscernible, flickered in the deeper shadows.

Five free divers gathered around three weighted guide ropes. They wore nose-plugs and wetsuits and long flippers. The less you move underwater the less air and energy are consumed, and these divers trained to swim deep for upwards of three minutes. They knew that when your stomach clenches with its need for air, you still had half your supply, and they were relaxed enough to use it all.

One diver wore a silver suit with a single flipper like a dolphin. Another dove down into the haze and reappeared thirty seconds later. He could dive deeper than a SCUBA diver, over a hundred meters, since he did not have to worry about a gas mixture or changes in the density of the air in his lungs. We watched them for a while—a squad of bobbing heads in the middle of that wilderness.

Jean, Amelia, and I swam back along the length of the wall to Hell’s Bells to exit. We practiced free diving as deep as we could, holding our noses to equalize the pressure in our ears. At the cleft, Jean got out first, and Amelia second and frozen stiff. “Are you okay?” said the Frenchman, and he went over to rub her shoulders warm. “Dude,” said Amelia, shivering as she backed away, “I think you need to take care of something.” A great mass of blood and snot was plastered to the side of his face, in a ring where the mask had been. “I think I went too deep,” he commented later.

We dove later and saw two divers with huge boxes on their back, in addition to the air tanks strapped to their sides. They had masks on their faces like fighter pilots. The boxes were of some silent make that emitted no bubbles, though sometimes they turned to the conventional SCUBA tanks and sent up a shower.

One night, as we sat in the Chinese restaurant, a Russian baroness led two local coolies out between two cafes to the surf and had them unload the two lobsters they carried stacked together into the saltwater. Set them free! spake this savior. Her charges were not young red pups hardly deserving their boiled fate, but huge, black crustaceans whose old and tired bones might appreciate a good hot bath.

She waved them a tearful goodbye, I imagine, and then turned and headed back to the road and whatever man sponsored her idiocy, and soon as she rounded the bend, the two coolies jumped in the water and dug around for the runaways, too fat and healthy to let fly. Their boss showed up to monitor the search. A few minutes later, they walked back to the road, lobsters under arm, and their feet left damp footprints in the dirt.

The greater world was not so sleepy as we, enjoying a venture into the Abyss and the taste of slimy noodles—the World Cup this way comes, and Egypt had a bare-boned chance at a slot in its brackets. In the days before the first contest with Algeria, we heard baseless rumors of an Egyptian holiday, and the day of saw locals wearing the red, white, and black of their flag on T-shirts or cheek-side tattoos. Those colors flew from flags on every restaurant and bicycle and truck, and exploded like napalm when Egypt beat Algeria 2-0.

We watched the end of the game with Adam and Pauline and Yashar in some cafe that projected it on the wall and sold cheap beer, although we spent the duration taking photographs, learning French sweet talk, and coming up with our own: Of the cross-eyed sort of expression that Amelia could assume, and of the roll her tongue could perform, I said, “When your eyes vibrate, it is like electric massage. When your tongue rolls, it is like the rolling waves of my heart.” And her lips moved coyly when she thought, so I said, “When your lips dance, I feel they are inviting me to the party,” and thought myself very clever.

The clap and howl of a human tempest signaled the Egyptian win. We filed up to the backstreet that King Chicken occupied and fell in with a honking parade. Victorious patriots danced on trucks slowed to a stop by the dancers in the street. They banged garbage can lids and waved flags and shot fire out of spray cans. They sang and cheered. “Allah ackbar!” God guide our footballs and destroy our enemies! We followed the riot down the street to where it focused in a massive demonstration, and then flew in the back of a truck to King Chicken for a satisfying dinner.

A few days later, Egypt lost to Algeria in Sudan. “The Egyptians are the sorest losers,” someone later told me. Rumors say they threw stones at the Algerian players so that three could not attend the match, then blamed the Algerians for the violence—they beat themselves up to make Egypt look bad! When Egypt eventually lost, chaos consumed Cairo for three full days, then sputtered out into a stupefied, hungover dismay.

In two weeks in Dahab I had drank more bottles of vodka than I had snorkeled, and with this deficiency of cold hard adventure in mind, we set out to do the Mount Sinai hike that all the Bibles of Travel will speak of. Thou shalt leave the hotel before midnight, and arrive at the base of the Mountain of Moses at two, and thou shalt climb it, alongside masses of tourists of Korea and Russia and Italy and Spain, and thou shalt freeze, even in summer, and then the holy light of dawn will pay for all those labors, for so the Lord hast decreed.

In our ragged little bus, Amelia put my borrowed coat against the window as a pillow, and I fell asleep on her shoulder, to wake only just before our arrival. The windows had frosted over, and the metal walls of the van were icy cold. We bought our tickets at a stone shack and continued driving. Outside we saw a great wagon circle of tourist buses, and in the middle a huge crowd of pilgrims and seekers, and vendors hawking scarves and gloves and hats. Their stalls lit up strangely the clearing, and the hushed crowds and the chill made it surreal as anything.

Jean, Amelia, and I disembarked with Nishanti, a Sri Lankan adopted by Holland, and a small gang of other Dahab travelers. Amelia was so wrapped up in clothes borrowed from a Dutch girl that she looked like an astronaut. Our driver ran up to us after Jean and I had bought checkered kefiyehs and told us we had a tour guide, and, hey, where are all the others? Somehow he tracked down the young couple from the bus, but the Austrian, the Chilean, the Dutchman, and the two Russian girls eluded us. We met the first three under the imposing stone walls of St. Catherine’s Monastery, where the tourist police were holding them for lack of a guide. We had Abdul!

Abdul had his wide kefiyeh tied around his head so it covered his neck. He wore only flip-flops, and had a jacket tied around his waist. He chatted pleasantly with us as we came out into a wide valley beyond the Monastery. The shadows of Bedouin rustled in the gloom of that moonless night. Some of them huddled around fires that bloomed red in the night. Our eyes picked out the shapes of camels lining the trail, and every once in a while a torch passed over dozens of the beast, and there were thousands in the valley. We smelled them and heard their groans.

The path led up and twisted back and forth, and we thanked the deep night for hiding its challenge from us, and for showing us a glimpse of the galaxy overhead. Every few minutes a camel would charge out of the dark toward us, attached by a leash to a fleet-footed Bedouin, and someone would shout, “Camel!” so everyone had time to get out of the way. Abdul taught us some words in a strange language, but he did not know enough English to tell us what language it was. On the slopes, he left the path for the rocks alongside it so he could rush ahead of us and the pilgrim line, and after waiting on a rocky perch shouted, “Sinai!” This was our group name until we came to another group using it, and then we were Cleopatra.

At tea houses on the road we took short breaks and sipped the water we brought and counted shooting stars, then Abdul waved us onward. In the valleys below, a thousand flashlights marked a long trail back to the parking lot. Soon our camel trail joined the Stairs of Repentance, those 3,750 steps lain by a most penitent monk. We climbed the last 500 of these, in the midst of a huge section of Korean pilgrims.

The top of Sinai was a plateau. We found a seat, wedged into it, and shrouded ourselves in sleeping bags. God spoke law to Moses here. We enjoyed his other gifts. Our bottled whiskey, altitude and exhaustion made us drunker than we should have been, so we took a lot of pictures of ourselves and made a lot of noise. The stars had fled, and the eastern horizon was a line of red and gold. We watched it forever, and then someone cried, “There it is!” A pinprick of light appeared between two peaks. It grew into a disc, and emerged rapidly as a chariot into the open sky, as if from beneath the world.