Biographies of explorers who were educated in Edinburgh. They knew what to take to Africa: Christianity, commerce, civilisation. They knew what they wanted to bring back: cotton watered by the Blue Nile, the Zambezi river. She walked after Bryan, felt his concentration, his interest in what was before him and thought, in a photograph we would not look nice together.

She touched the glass of a cabinet showing papyrus rolls and copper pots. She pressed her forehead and nose against the cool glass. If she could enter the cabinet, she would not make a good exhibit. She wasn’t right; she was too modern, too full of mathematics.

Only the carpet, its petroleum blue, pleased her. She had come to this museum expecting sunlight and photographs of the Nile, something to appease her homesickness, a comfort, a message. But the messages were not for her, not for anyone like her. A letter from West Africa, 1762, an employee to his employer in Scotland. An employee trading European goods for African curiosities. It was a great difficulty to make the natives understand my meaning, even by an interpreter, it being a thing so seldom asked of them, but they have all undertaken to bring something and laughed heartily at me and said, I was a good man to love their country so much …

Love my country so much. She should not be here; there was nothing for her here. She wanted to see minarets, boats fragile on the Nile, people. People like her father. Times she had sat in the waiting room of his clinic, among pregnant women, the pain in her heart because she was going to see him in a few minutes. His room, the air-conditioner, the smell of his pipe, his white coat. When she hugged him, he smelled of Listerine mouthwash. He could never remember how old she was, what she was studying. Six daughters, how could he possibly keep track? In his confusion, there was freedom for her, games to play, a lot of teasing. She visited his clinic in secret, telling lies to her mother. She loved him more than she loved her mother. Her mother who did everything for her, tidied her room, sewed her clothes from Burda magazine. Shadia was twenty-five and her mother washed everything for her by hand, even her pants and bras.

‘I know why they went away,’ said Bryan. ‘I understand why they travelled.’ At last he was talking. She had not seen him this intense before. He spoke in a low voice, ‘They had to get away, to leave here …’

‘To escape from the horrible weather …’ She was making fun of him. She wanted to put him down. The imperialists who had humiliated her history were heroes in his eyes.

He looked at her. ‘To escape …’ he repeated.

‘They went to benefit themselves,’ she said. ‘People go away because they benefit in some way …’

‘I want to get away,’ he said.