The stones were low and scattered over the wilderness. There seemed to be far more of them than homes below, which seemed reasonable enough: the houses held—or had—the living, but the graves would hold the bones of everyone who’d lived here since the first hut went up.

We drifted slowly through the graves. Without close inspection I could barely make out the lettering in the stone, and from our elevated vantage point the Nile was just a pale blue line. We sat down to rest, and with no shade to be found, balanced our notebooks on our heads.

I remember that moment clearly, sitting in the company of unknown ancestors, because it was the first time Bahr told me anything about his past.

We had gone to see my grandmother. Me, my father, my mother. I mean, we’d gone to see her grave. The family tomb, I mean. Our graves aren’t holes in a desert marked with stones, like the villages do out here; they’re walled compounds, like the mausoleums in Cairo. My family’s tomb has two rooms, one for the bones of the men, the other for the women. Anyway, we got to the tomb, and for some reason I started thinking of my friend Yasser who’d passed away years before. He used to play with us, though all the kids knew he was sick and so tried—at least most of us tried—not to do anything to upset him. But we were never sure how he was sick exactly. What the problem was. You’d be playing, and in the middle of a game, just like that, he’d slump to the ground and clutch his chest, his voice turning thin as a steam whistle. Then one day, without warning, he wasn’t playing with us anymore. Next thing we knew, he was dead. He was some kind of relative, so they put him in our tomb.

To my parent’s surprise I walked straight past the entrance to the women’s chamber and into the men’s, and there I stood and said a prayer for him, shy as a little boy. Once I’d rejoined them my father asked me, smiling, “So who got the prayer?”

“Yasser,” I said.

My father, still smiling: “You could pray for him anywhere.”

“So why do we come here for Grandma?”

“To keep her company. So she can hear us and see us.”

“Same for Yasser, then.”

My father shook his head and patted mine, but then Sayyid, son of Umm Sayyid the caretaker, dropped his bomb:

“Yasser’s not here. We cleared the tomb out six months ago.”

The first I’d ever heard of clearing tombs. I was told that whenever the tomb grew too crowded with bones, they were gathered up and interred far away, in the cliff face.