PART TWO

A dream is just a thought bubble until the feet get moving. Importantly, we know that dreams don’t form before action is taken, but dreams begin to form as feet begin to move.

Graham Long, former pastor and CEO of the Wayside Chapel, Kings Cross, Sydney

Cairo, Egypt, August 1997

The honey-coloured stone mosques of Cairo rose high above neighbouring buildings.

While it was one of the world’s greatest cities, it was also a work in progress. Not far from downtown Talaat Harb Square, in the centre of Cairo, piles of sand, tools and scaffolding lay on just about every street corner. People navigating their way through the rubble and tangled webs of unlabelled streets included men whose roadside carts were stocked with freshly roasted sweet potatoes and boys balancing trays of still-hot pita bread. Watching on were big brown birds perched on flagpoles, ready to swoop on whatever piece of trash appeared vaguely edible.

In Sydney there were around four million people; here there were sixteen million. Adding to the hordes of pedestrians forming a never-ending push to who knew where was the call to prayer blasting from speakers all over the place, five times a day. Some of the city was melodic; some of it was hellish.

Rachel looked down on it all from the window of the twelve-storey budget hotel where she and Nikki were staying. Although they were a long way up from street level, the honking of horns dominated Cairo at great heights. The two of them had flown in to the city late on a steamy Thursday evening. Over a continental breakfast at their hotel, they’d discussed going to a couple of museums in the city in the morning and the Pyramids at Giza in the afternoon.

When they left the hotel and stepped across the potholed streets, small children eyed them with curiosity. It wasn’t just the kids who noticed them: amid the mosques, banks, clothing stores, juice stands, and cafes perfumed by cigarettes and tea, it seemed every third or fourth local man felt obliged to shout, ‘Welcome to Cairo!’ at them.

Rachel found the tone cynical rather than friendly and pretended not to hear. But being ignored didn’t discourage some men – they unashamedly followed the young Western women around, often for several blocks at a time, before giving up and turning back to wherever they had come from. They knew just enough English to start up a conversation with tourists, and their questions and taunts were mostly the same: ‘What your name?’ ‘Where you from?’ ‘You have very nice blue eyes.’ ‘Where your husband?’ Every time Rachel was asked that last question, she found it hard not to giggle. No one back home assumed she was married.

Nikki was so fixated on the map she’d got from their hotel that she remained undistracted. It didn’t matter that many of the streets were labelled in Arabic characters – like the smart kid at school who could solve a maths problem three times as fast as anyone else, Nikki was more than capable of making sense of Cairo.

Magnificent treasures awaited inside the museums, from gold statues of the pharaohs to exquisite jewellery, paintings, religious icons, glassware and wood carvings. In one museum, an entire floor shone with nothing but gold. How was it, Rachel wondered, that such wealth could exist, only to be admired but never touched, while Cairo’s streets lay potholed and strewn with rubble, and were filled with dirty children who begged tourists for baksheesh?

At lunchtime she and Nikki sat at a table made from battered tin in a crowded cafe as they tucked into sandwiches filled with kofta, falafel, humus, babaganoush and shawarma. It was easy to feast like a pharaoh in Cairo and pay next to nothing. It was also wonderful to be left alone; local men had better things to do in cafes than harass tourists, like concentrate on games of backgammon and dominoes, or read newspapers while sipping little glasses of Turkish coffee.

At the foot of the Pyramids at Giza, a man with short dark curly hair asked Rachel if she wanted to sit on his camel so Nikki could take a photo. The camel was kneeling, and Rachel had no trouble climbing onto its saddle. But once she was seated the camel stood up, and the man led it and Rachel away. The beast’s huge squashy feet picked up a pace that caused her knuckles to turn porcelain-white as she gripped the front of the saddle. Soon she was bobbing up and down like a floppy doll as the beast’s hooves kicked through dusty mounds of sand. She couldn’t get off until she paid twenty Egyptian pounds, the Bedouin told her.

When he eventually led the camel back to where Nikki was waiting, Rachel was close to tears. As she searched in her canvas bag for twenty pounds, Nikki quickly found a ten-pound Egyptian note and handed it to the Bedouin. He didn’t insist on any more. Off-white froth spilled from the camel’s mouth as it got down on its knees and lowered its back legs. Once Rachel was free, she fixed its owner with a look to match what she thought of him and his filthy beast.

This wasn’t a great introduction to the pyramids, and it didn’t help that the sky was pressing down on the earth with the heat of an iron needed to smooth the creases from a linen shirt.

The entrance to the largest of the three main pyramids was a black hole people could access by climbing over huge blocks of stone. Once Rachel and Nikki were inside, it smelled of dampness, rock and time. Further ahead, the echoes of footfalls and shuffling mingled with a man’s well-modulated voice wafting down the passageway. ‘It took 10,000 people about eleven years and 2.3 million limestone blocks to build this great monument.’

As Rachel and Nikki inched their way up the dimly lit pyramid in single file, the guide’s voice grew louder. Now he was talking about the agricultural workers who helped construct the pyramids whenever there was little for them to do in the fields, such as during floods from the Nile.

When Rachel and Nikki caught up with the group, they were wedged into a room in the heart of the pyramid. The focal point was a granite coffin without a lid. Here was the burial site of the Pharaoh Cheops, the guide whispered, around seven thousand years ago. Rachel became conscious of a faint feeling of claustrophobia and a lump forming in her throat. They were forty-five metres above the sandhills outside but could just as easily have been a hundred metres beneath the ground.

‘It makes us wonder,’ the guide’s spiel continued, ‘about the purpose of this great pyramid. The Pharaoh is believed to have taken with him all the trappings of his earthly life for the next world – and yet, nothing of his has been found. So what happened to his treasures?’

A man with an American accent thought he knew the answer. ‘Did robbers break into the coffin?’

The guide nodded solemnly. ‘So we believe. The lid from Cheops’ great stone coffin was lifted two hundred years or so after his death, and the gold was taken.’

Murmurs mingled with sighs as someone suddenly switched off the light.

The room smelled horrible, and its air seemed stuffier than ever. It also felt haunted. Overcome by a sense the walls and ceiling were closing in, Rachel took a deep breath and let out a sharp sigh.

When someone shone a flashlight on one of the walls, the face of an old man with a dazed look in his heavy dark brown eyes stared back at her. He wasn’t a hieroglyphic: his expression was too intense to be made up of characters or symbols. So who was he? The intensity of his gaze prompted Rachel to move away, but her legs felt like jelly.

More shuffling and whispering added to her confusion as her breathing shallowed. Nearby someone was emitting noises resembling the exhausted sighs of giving birth, muffled enough to sound more like whimpers than groans.

It wasn’t until Nikki grabbed hold of her arm, while someone else was lifting her to her feet, that Rachel realised she had collapsed, and the laboured breathing she could hear was her own.

‘It’s okay, Rach,’ Nikki was saying. ‘We’re getting you out of here.’

Now she felt humiliated. Her hands were clammy, and her heart was throbbing. She hadn’t meant to draw attention to herself; at the same time she longed to get out of the dimly lit, narrow tunnel, back into the light of day.

Nikki was right behind her and speaking in an almost coaxing manner, as though Rachel were in primary school. An older woman in front of her was telling her how well she was doing. The black granite walls lightened as they neared the mouth of the pyramid and stepped outside.

Blinking back tears, Rachel collapsed to her knees on a slab and placed her hand over her mouth. She thought she was going to be sick but merely dry retched. Nikki was swabbing her forehead with a damp bandana. A few gulps of water later, the dizziness subsided, and she was able to sit upright. She told Nikki she was okay.

‘No problem,’ her friend responded cheerfully. ‘Let’s get you back to the hotel.’

They walked past a crowd of merchants hell-bent on extorting money from tourists, as they headed towards a limestone creature with the body of a lion and the head of a person. The monument had lost its nose and a large chip from its shoulder, someone was telling a small group, so it was getting a nose job and a face lift to prevent the rest of its features from sliding off. Once the reconstruction was finished, the creature would look centuries younger. Rachel found herself smiling at the commentary.

In the taxi to Talaat Harb Square, she looked out of a window so thick with grime it would have needed to be cleaned with industrial strength chemicals. The hypnotic beat of an Arabic tune was blasting from the taxi’s radio as the driver plaited his way around other taxis, tuktuks, red-and-white minibuses, and people riding motorbikes and bicycles. There didn’t appear to be lines marked on the road to divide the lanes, but Cairo kept moving along to the tune of honking horns and the smell of blue smoke pumping from exhaust pipes dating back to the 1970s.

When Rachel and Nikki arrived at their hotel, Nikki asked the receptionist if she knew of a Western doctor Rachel could see. She was worried her friend’s blood sugar level was low. But Rachel said she was feeling much better and that all she needed was a rest. Nikki was only too happy to sleep the afternoon off. Cairo was crazy – tomorrow they would go somewhere quieter, she assured Rachel.

The city of Aswan was a twelve-hour trip from Cairo on a diesel train, chugging past village after village. Most of the houses were small brown boxes built from mud; of those, many were midway between two and three storeys high, with piles of rubble strewn around them. From her window seat, Rachel gazed at the date palm groves, banana plantations, chickens, water buffalos, and slow-moving trails of camels. Donkeys were saddled with hessian bags and up to three riders at a time. Girls in bright shirts that reached their ankles were balancing buckets of water on their heads with the grace of catwalk models.

After several hours of staring out through her grubby window, Rachel plugged in her Discman and again listened to the soundtrack from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. She still knew most of the lyrics by heart, but each time she listened it affected her in a different way.

This time she appreciated there was always an upside to Joseph’s troubles. Had he not been sold into slavery, he would not have been chosen by a pharaoh to save the world – in fact, he would have remained a starving shepherd. And while many people would have forever resented being spectacularly betrayed by their siblings, Joseph had another attitude. When his brothers came to Egypt in search of food, he used his position as the second most powerful man in the world to ensure they would live comfortably. The moral of the story was that you could never truly know when the next step would lead to success. Several times, Joseph’s story appeared to come to a sorry end, yet a way out of his troubles was always possible.

Each of the bowler hatted man’s adventures had a moral too, involving problem-solving and helping others. That made them all the more special to Rachel.

Aswan, home to the world’s largest reservoir, was brimming with cruise ships and feluccas. When Rachel and Nikki checked into their hotel, backpackers were discussing the merits of taking a felucca down the Nile. It was the best option for visiting the botanical garden and a Nubian village on the opposite banks of the river, a girl with a European accent was saying. ‘I love the thought of sitting beneath one of those big white triangular sails, and a return trip will cost very little.’

That was all very well, a girl with the same accent responded. But she had heard mixed reviews about longer trips that went for several days. ‘What if we got stuck with some sleazy captain who tried to come on to us? We would be with him for the rest of the trip.’

Early in the evening, Rachel and Nikki strolled along the riverfront, Corniche el-Nil, where there were hotels, shops, banks, cruise ships and felucca docks. As the sun set, the red desert sandstone that lined the banks of the Nile gave everything a pink hue. The warm breeze was calming, Rachel felt.

The serenity was broken by the felucca captains, who squabbled over tourists like a bunch of magpies staking out new territory. Nikki soon had enough. Turning to two of the men who had targeted her and Rachel, she waved as though acknowledging someone in a passing car, then shouted, ‘Imshi!’

One of the captains held up his hands and stepped back. ‘Please don’t say that.’

‘Go on, off you go,’ Nikki said firmly.

Both men scampered away.

‘What on earth did you say to them?’ Rachel asked.

‘I came across this word “imshi” in your guidebook. It could mean something really obscene, for all I know.’

When a man with an American accent at the far end of the riverfront asked Rachel if she was interested in a trip on the large cruise ship behind him, she wondered why he was bothering with her. She wasn’t in the same league as the older, richer American tourists striding around in designer sneakers.

She called Nikki over. The asking price of 200 US dollars for the trip seemed exorbitant. But Rachel was by now a little jealous of fellow travellers who weren’t in Egypt on a shoestring; it would be amazing to experience some of what they were doing, if only for a day. The biggest boat she had ever been on was the Manly Ferry. This one was like ‘Fairstar the fun ship’, the gleaming white vessel she had seen docked at Circular Quay when she was still at school.

The man scratched his head when she said that she and her friend had been staying at places that only cost five Egyptian pounds a night, so there was no way they could afford his asking price. He asked, ‘How does 100 US dollars sound then?’

Neither Rachel nor Nikki had expected such a big price drop so soon.

‘One hundred each?’ Nikki clarified.

With a sag of his huge shoulders, the man appeared not to care in the slightest that the women were so frugal he had to lower his price by half to get them on board. It was like being at a fruit market late on a Sunday afternoon, when the produce was reduced to prevent it from being discarded. ‘If you want to come,’ he said, ‘purchase your tickets by midday tomorrow.’

The botanic garden on the other side of the river gave life to African and Asian tropical plants, and was a true respite from the frenzy of being targeted by locals who unashamedly saw tourists as an excellent source of money. Aside from the plants and the exotic birds that congregated in the garden, Rachel and Nikki were the only ones there. The plants were hydrated by strategically placed sprinklers that hissed like rattlesnakes as they emitted erratic squirts. That sound alone was strangely soothing, Rachel thought.

‘I wonder if this is the only place in Egypt where you can be left in complete peace?’ she said out loud.

‘Quite possibly,’ Nikki responded. ‘I don’t think we’ll miss the hawking, though you never know. Being on a tube full of people who deliberately ignore each other is kind of weird too, don’t you think?’

Rachel agreed. She didn’t like excessive attention, but the etiquette of crowd behaviour in Western cities could be alienating and stressful. ‘Agree. Neither feels comfortable.’

The felucca captain who took them to the garden also showed Rachel and Nikki Elephantine Island, where there was an archaeological museum. Among its limited collection was a mutilated skull and a few stone coffins, thinly covered with gold paint. Nikki told Rachel she hoped the captain wouldn’t decide to ditch them while they were inside – how else would they get back to the Corniche el-Nil?

Her concern was short-lived. On the other side of a dune, a triangular piece of white cotton was bobbing up and down in the water. Beneath the giant sail was the same man who had taken the girls to the island. They had paid him five Egyptian pounds to do so, on the understanding he would return them for the same amount.

The girls made it back to the Corniche el-Nil in time to buy half-price tickets for the Seti, and they weren’t disappointed when they boarded that evening. For dinner on the air-conditioned ship there was a smorgasbord of cold meats, trout, herring, smoked-salmon rolls, pasta salads, marinated mushrooms, duck pâté, cheese and biscuits. Desserts ranged from every type of fruit to mini-cheesecakes, orange almond cake with orange sauce, and chocolate fudge with raspberry sauce. Rachel and Nikki went back for seconds. On the top deck they swam a few laps of a ten-metre-long pool, then sat back on blue-and-white pinstriped deckchairs.

When the ship departed Aswan around midnight, its motor rumbled so gently Rachel didn’t wake. Hours later she drew back a curtain covering a small circular window. A galaxy of stars blinked down at her.

Her dad had once told her, ‘Humanity’s fascination with the stars springs from a desire to return to where we came from.’ It had something to do with an explosion billions of years ago. ‘We are a spark from that explosion,’ he’d said.

When Rachel was seven, she and her dad had taken a train to Milsons Point one evening in early December, then walked across the Harbour Bridge and on to the Sydney Observatory. She had loved having her hair whipped around by the wind as green-and-yellow ferries below made their way to and from Manly. Among them was a collection of smaller boats bobbing up and down.

Through a telescope at the observatory, it was possible to see a cluster of planets. There were lots of shapes to make out too, including a saucepan and the Southern Cross.

Afterwards, Rachel and her dad went to the Menzies Hotel for iced chocolates and cake. The hotel had the biggest Christmas tree and the fanciest lights she’d ever seen. When they walked all the way back across the Harbour Bridge to Milsons Point station, it was well past her bedtime. She fell asleep on her dad’s shoulder during the train trip and didn’t wake until they reached Pymble.

Her mum feigned surprise when they eventually walked through the front door of their family home. ‘Young lady, it’s almost midnight. If you don’t go to bed this very minute, you’ll turn into a pumpkin!’

Rachel giggled at being compared to Cinderella.

Earlier on, her mum and Samantha had gone dress shopping for a special dinner to mark the end of primary school. Rachel felt she’d had a far more exciting time and couldn’t wait to tell Samantha about it the next morning.

Reflecting on that evening as she lay back down in her cabin bed, Rachel fell into sleep again. She dreamed of walking past the neatly trimmed hedges that lined the pebbled pathway of her Sydney home. The potted plants were still in place, as was the angel of the garden statue. But once Rachel opened the front door and went inside, she was utterly terrified by the emptiness she felt.

‘Is that you, Rachel?’ a voice called out.

She was pretty sure it was her mum’s. But each time she attempted to locate the voice, she only came across another empty room.

The next time she woke, she pushed back the curtain above her to find it was daylight – and that a donkey was staring at her.

Over scrambled eggs, sausages and grilled tomatoes, a crew member told Rachel and Nikki the ship had docked at Edfu for three hours. They could visit the Temple of Horus, if they wanted, in which case a vehicle would take them and bring them back. It was only because a large group of Americans were going that Nikki and Rachel decided to go to the temple. So long as the others were in sight, they were confident the Seti wouldn’t accidentally sail off without them.

It was not yet nine o’clock when their group arrived at the temple, but it was already very hot. An old man with a milky cataract in his left eye was a welcome sight because he was selling bottles of water. Nikki poured a small amount over her head as Rachel circled a giant stone cut into the shape of a falcon. She later walked beneath a roofed courtyard held up by twelve giant stone columns, each elaborately carved with hieroglyphs. Seeking relief from the heat, she rested in the shade of a column and closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she noticed an olive-skinned man in an ankle-length white shirt. His chin was covered by a long pointy beard, and he was smiling and motioning for her to follow him. She watched on in a daze as he slipped behind a golden-hued stone wall.

What an odd little man, she thought.

Moments later he was back. This time his expression was more intense.

Rachel stood up, brushed off the gravel clinging to her cargo pants, then walked towards him.

He grinned and nodded at her, only to turn his back on her and trot off up a path lined with piles of stones. When he reached the end of the path he checked to see if she was still behind him. ‘Yalla,’ he yelled out.

Common sense told her to ignore him, yet she felt compelled to keep following him as he turned a corner, went down another path lined with more rubble, then half skipped down a set of dusty concrete stairs.

At the bottom of the stairs was a yellow door. The little man opened it, stepped inside, then spun around and waved at Rachel. Perhaps it was a shop, she reasoned. After all, most of the time when the Egyptians wanted her attention, it was to offer her something to buy.

She followed him down the stairs and through the door. Behind it was a room made from stone. The floor was covered with a burgundy and gold rug. Stepping through an archway leading to another room, she felt something resembling a light cool breeze caress her arms – only there were no open windows or fans in the room. Like those of the first room, the walls were mostly bare, with the exception of a brass lantern inside a square hole cut into one of the walls. The stone floor was partly covered with another soft thick rug, a knee-high table, and burgundy and gold cushions. In the centre of the table a candle flickered. Rachel was also conscious of the aroma of cinnamon buns, incense and coffee.

She barely had enough time to take in her surroundings when a woman in a floor-length, light green cotton dress joined her from a third room. Behind the woman was the odd little man Rachel had followed.

The slim, straight-backed woman was holding four golden goblets on a tray. This place didn’t look like a restaurant, but the woman appeared to be at Rachel’s service. She placed the tray on the table, then urged Rachel to take a seat on one of the cushions. Smiling meekly, the woman left the room and returned soon after with another tray. On it was a large coffee pot, a small cup of milk and a plate stacked with baklava.

This definitely wasn’t a restaurant, because Rachel hadn’t ordered the coffee or the milk or the pastries. Perhaps the Egyptians were just very hospitable.

The woman and the man sat alongside Rachel with their eyes cast to the floor.

Moments clacked against each other. Rachel watched as the woman’s long dark eyelashes slowly folded down over her eyes and rested on the delicate flesh beneath them. Rachel could hear the soft wail of a flute sliding in and out of the rhythmic beat of a drum; where the music was coming from, she wasn’t sure.

The woman opened her eyes, gently raised her head and offered Rachel a piece of baklava. ‘Please,’ she said in English.

Rachel nibbled on the layers of flaky pastry as honey and chopped nuts spilled onto her fingers.

The woman poured thick syrupy coffee into Rachel’s goblet. She wasn’t sure she liked the look of the liquid but decided to at least try it – after all, it would be rude to offend her hosts.

She should have been concerned about missing the minibus scheduled to take her group back to the Seti. But after drinking the coffee and savouring the sweetness of the baklava, Rachel experienced what it was like to have no sense of time or place. She was not conscious she was twenty-three years old, that it was 1997, that she was travelling through Egypt or that her mother was in Sydney. Nor was she conscious she was shy by nature and the company of strangers normally made her nervous.

How long she and her two companions continued to sit there, in a quiet, meditative state, Rachel did not know. One minute she was looking down at the table, the next she was looking into the face of someone who had come to join them. He appeared to be in his late sixties to early seventies. Beneath his prominent nose was a moustache tinged with grey. A black-and-white chequered keffiyeh covered his head.

Though he wasn’t young, he wasn’t frail either. His shoulders were broad, and he sat upright. He seemed familiar, but Rachel wasn’t sure why; perhaps people of a certain age all began to look the same.

It was the intensity of the man’s gaze that worried her. He said, ‘What I am about to tell you may shock you. It need not, but it is important.’ His accent was heavy, but his English was good.

Sweat beaded on Rachel’s forehead. She resisted the urge to wipe it off with the back of her hand.

‘You are on your way to Israel,’ the man stated.

She frowned. How did he know that?

He seemed to read her thoughts. ‘There are many young people like yourself travelling through both Egypt and Israel nowadays.’

Rachel nodded slowly and smiled politely. It was true: she and Nikki had met several travellers who were visiting both counties.

‘You intend on staying on a kibbutz, yes?’ the man queried.

‘Probably,’ she said half-heartedly. She wasn’t sure she wanted to confirm her plans with him.

‘There will be Arabs and Jews living side by side when you get there.’ The words fell from his mouth like evenly spaced droplets of water from a leaky tap.

Rachel remained quiet. She knew very little about the ongoing tensions in the Middle East. But even if she’d had an indepth understanding of the conflict, instinct told her here was not the place to discuss it.

Bizarrely, the man then said that her naivete and lack of knowledge of the Middle East were assets.

Is he serious? Rachel thought. She wasn’t being treated with disdain, but she didn’t like being called ‘naive’ either.

The man shut his eyes as though he was deep in concentration. A long pause followed, before he spoke again. ‘Whenever there are moves to reduce Israeli–Arab tensions, one side or the other will act to ensure normal hostilities resume.’

‘That is a shame,’ Rachel said. But what on earth did this man – whose face she couldn’t place – hope to achieve from discussing centuries of hostilities with her?

The weight of his next words caused her head to slump. ‘Two suicide bombers blew themselves up at an outdoor Jewish market in Jerusalem two days ago. They killed thirteen people and wounded more than a hundred and fifty others.’

Rachel’s pulse quickened.

‘There were supposed to be peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians this week. Now Benjamin Netanyahu says the Palestinian Liberation Authority is not committed to fighting the terrorists.’

Rachel didn’t want to cause any offence, but she was utterly confused. ‘I’m sorry – I’m not sure what any of this has to do with me,’ she said in a voice slightly louder than a whisper.

She glanced at the woman who had poured the coffee. Their eyes met briefly, then hers slid away.

The old man was saying something about people still respecting each other on kibbutzim. ‘They were established to provide fairness for everyone. Everywhere else in the world, there is nothing but hatred and envy.’

Rachel felt a little drunk. Perhaps the coffee had been spiked.

She looked towards the flicker of the candle on the table and wondered if she would be able to stand without collapsing to the ground. Sucking in a lungful of air, she rubbed her eyes. Maybe she was dreaming.

When she opened her eyes, the old man, the strange little man and the woman had gone. The soothing notes of the flute had stopped.

Turning around, she saw the yellow door through the stone archway behind her. It was wide open. She walked to the door, went out into the blatant heat of the morning sun, then gingerly headed back up the stairs. She kept going until she reached the statue of the falcon. Her face was flushed, and her throat was dry. She fell to the ground and rested her head on her knees.

When she looked up, Nikki was standing over her, telling her to come and see a chapel with an awesome picture on the ceiling. ‘There’s a sky goddess reaching around the zodiac.’

Rachel arched her back and stretched her arms above her head. ‘How long have we been here?’

Nikki shrugged. ‘About fifteen minutes, I guess. There’s still plenty of time to look around.’

How could time move so slowly? Rachel thought. Surely they had been at the temple for longer than fifteen minutes. She was exhausted, like she’d experienced a whole day’s worth of activity. But she didn’t have the energy to reflect on it, let alone discuss it.

She noticed Nikki shifting her weight from one leg to the other, as though she was keen to keep moving. ‘Are you okay?’ her friend asked.

‘Yes, just tired. I think it’s the heat.’

Nikki handed her a bottle of water. ‘It will stop you from getting dehydrated.’

After gulping down half the contents, Rachel sighed heavily and closed her eyes again. Now she felt better.

Just as the cruise ship was leaving Edfu, someone passed a falcon to one of the passengers. The enormous bird wasn’t in a cage but had a metal ring around its left foot and a string tied to the ring. The bird didn’t appear to be in the least bit alarmed when it was passed from land to sea. Such was life in this part of the world, Rachel thought – what would have appeared odd anywhere else didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow in Egypt.

Rachel told Nikki she hoped the bird would be treated humanely. She hated any sort of cruelty towards animals and was pleased it wasn’t in a cage. When she was a child the next-door neighbours kept a couple of canaries. Her dad didn’t like it; he thought it was unnatural. It was flight they longed for when their chirping sounded raspy, he said. Birds were winged souls, he added; the Egyptians even believed they had a place in the afterlife. At school, Rachel had heard about a study on geese that found they responded to death by flying and calling in search of their loved one, until they became disorientated and lost. ‘It’s so sad,’ she told Nikki.

But Nikki wasn’t particularly interested in hearing Rachel’s thoughts on birds struggling with grief: she was more concerned with where they were going to stay once they reached Luxor. She was also keen to know how to go about applying for a stay on a kibbutz. It would be wonderful to stop moving around so much, she told Rachel. Not only was it expensive, but it also wasn’t allowing them much in the way of non-touristy experiences.

Rachel handed Nikki her paperback about kibbutz life. ‘All the addresses are in here.’

Nikki stretched out across three fabric seats and skim-read several pages. It didn’t take her long to summarise the general gist. ‘Okay, so it’s a bit like communism. A kibbutz is a socialistic society whereby everything produced is owned by the entire community. It sounds like there were a lot of volunteers in the 1970s, because people back then were big on embracing utopian ideologies. But now idealism is in short supply and backpackers aren’t so willing to work for free.’

Rachel didn’t think of it as working for free: she saw it as an opportunity to immerse herself in an alternative world where there was structure and a solid purpose. Chopping vegetables and collecting eggs sounded almost noble. It was also convenient that volunteers didn’t have to pay for meals or accommodation.

‘Well, it’s certainly more imaginative than seeing the world from a Contiki bus.’ Nikki laughed as she slammed the book shut and whacked it down in the space between her and Rachel.

When she and Nikki reached Luxor, Rachel was keen to locate a giant stone statue of a scarab at Karnak Temple and walk around it nine times. It was a bit of a naff thing to do, she told Nikki, ‘but no more so than kissing the Blarney Stone in Ireland, upside down.’ Nikki didn’t care for the superstitious belief it would safeguard their fertility and told Rachel she would meet her back at the entrance. In truth, Rachel wanted to pay homage to what Dad had said about the scarab – that it was a symbol of immortality and resurrection, representing the cycle of death and rebirth. She was correct in thinking Nikki would be dismissive of walking around and around a big stone on a hot day.

She later found her friend gazing up at one of the temple’s colossal columns with a somewhat blank expression on her face.

In the afternoon they stepped into the tombs of pharaoh after pharaoh at the Valley of the Kings. While the ancient Egyptians had gone to great lengths to hide the tombs, it hadn’t stopped robbers and archaeologists from claiming most of the treasures inside, but there was still plenty left over for tourists to appreciate. Rachel and Nikki’s guide made a point of shining his torch along the corridors so they could see the paintings that decorated them. One was covered with headless bodies, elongated limbs, and naked men riding cobras; another was inscribed with the entire text of the Book of the Dead. The purpose of the paintings was to create a pleasant afterlife. But access to eternity was not guaranteed: the dead had to negotiate a dangerous underworld journey before they were admitted. Rachel lingered at the faces of demons, serpents and wild beasts. How could such creatures possibly assist someone’s passage into the afterlife?

The Tomb of Tutankhamun required a special ticket, but by the time they reached it Nikki had seen enough and wanted a break from the burial chambers. So Rachel looked at the tomb on her own. It was famous, she learned, because it had been discovered relatively intact and relatively recently – just seventy-five years earlier. It was small compared with the others and not so richly decorated.

Rich or poor, the ancient Egyptians did everything to prepare for the afterlife. Her dad had described their tombs as resurrection machines. If the afterlife really was a magical place that could be accessed through careful preparation, would he have been admitted?

Parents and their children were standing beside Rachel as she contemplated all of this. One boy looked about ten but was as excited as a three-year-old who had just been given a new toy. He was lightly whacking the arm of a wide-shouldered, tanned man in his late thirties. ‘Dad. Dad. Why is King Tut so important?’

‘I don’t really know,’ the man responded with an easy smile and a German accent. ‘Perhaps he was the richest pharaoh of them all.’

‘Wow!’ said the boy, dragged out in a voice loud enough to disturb the gods.

The dad’s explanation was a bit naff, Rachel thought. Of course her father would have known everything there was to know about King Tutankhamun. He would have given an unpretentious reason for the Pharaoh’s fame, mixed in with fun facts about his modern-day popularity and influence on world culture. A little crowd may have gathered, such was Dr Mahoney’s passion for ancient Egypt. Although he was shy and humble, he wouldn’t have felt put upon or embarrassed – speaking about his area of expertise came as naturally as cleaning his teeth.

Watching the German family exit the tomb, Rachel felt overwhelmed by sadness. Being in close proximity to the small family unit left her pining for her own family pre-1984. They would have had such fun on an Egyptian tour, mostly because Dr Mahoney would have revealed dozens of secrets inaccessible to everyday tourists. Rachel longed to know where he would have taken them and what they would have done. He might have shown her where he’d bought the scarab necklace she wore every day; she’d been looking out for one just like it but had only seen versions.

Over the next few days, the heat, dust and arms waving hotel business cards in her face were unwanted companions as she and Nikki made their way from Luxor to Hurghada and then to the seaport of Nuweiba. On the ferry from there to Jordan, a wave of nausea forced Rachel to lie low on a deckchair and shut her eyes.

An English girl was complaining about Egyptians having no sense of Greenwich Mean Time. ‘They just don’t realise there are sixty minutes in an hour,’ she moaned.

Nikki muttered that everyone was on holiday and time didn’t matter much. Despite Rachel’s seasick state, the dry remark made her smile.

‘I don’t go there,’ a taxi driver from Jordan said as he pulled up about half a kilometre from the Israeli border. He felt no need to give an explanation, and Rachel and Nikki felt no need to argue with him. They paid the fare, got out of the cab and walked into Israel with their packs on their backs.

Along the way, coils of barbed wire on fences stretching further than the eye could see divided one part of the barren, dusty landscape from another. Every fifty metres or so was a sign warning in Arabic and English of landmines if anyone was thinking of trespassing. The text was capitalised in red.

‘The land was as flat as a pancake,’ Sir George had told Rachel, describing the Western Desert. This long expanse of sand was also very flat and possibly just as fraught with hostility as the war involving German and Italian forces attempting to conquer the Allies. British troops had spread themselves thinly across hundreds of miles of sparse land facing the Libyan frontier, Sir George had also said. Somehow the tactic convinced the enemy they were stronger than they were.

At a checkpoint on the border of Jordan and Israel, the customs officer scanned their bags with X-ray equipment and was immediately interested in the two brass cats Rachel had bought at an outdoor market in Luxor. Nikki wasn’t interested in such things: she preferred to experience moments with her own two eyes rather than through a camera lens or a memento. But Rachel wanted tangible proof of where she had been. The man with the bowler hat always returned to the real world with a little souvenir from his adventures, to prove to himself they had happened.

‘Take them out,’ ordered the officer, a woman in her late twenties with unruly dark hair that fell loosely around her shoulders. Her make-up had been generously applied, and her khaki trousers were tight. The top two buttons of her white shirt were undone, revealing a silver pendant engraved with Hebrew writing. In Egypt it had been rare to see local women in public, and they were always covered from head to toe in black garments. Now a relatively scantily dressed woman was in a position of authority – and not afraid to use it.

Rachel pushed aside unwashed socks and stained t-shirts to retrieve the brass cats. She nervously removed them from a pair of knee-high socks and handed them over. To her surprise, the woman checked to see if anything had been inserted inside their hollow interiors.

Do I seriously look like the sort of person who would carry an explosive device? Rachel wondered.

‘Very nice,’ the woman said when she returned the statues. There was genuine kindness in her eyes as she told Rachel and Nikki to have a nice time in the port of Eilat.

Rachel smiled back. From Eilat, they would be free to walk into Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.