When the man reached us he stopped. “Assalamu aleikom.” We returned the greeting, and then, Bahr shrinking back to give him space, he carefully placed his foot on the bottom step. He examined us for a moment, and it was as though he were on the verge of asking us something, but he seemed to reconsider, and climbed past us to the top of the riverbank—the height of a roof above us—and wandered away.

Now Bahr extended a foot and placed it on the face of the river, into which it sunk until the water rose over the heel, exactly as it had on the feet of the man in the robe. He set the second foot beside the first, took a step, and nodded. Smiled.

“Let’s go.”

My bare sole descended a few centimeters through river water and came to rest on a slippery surface. Later, I would learn, that for a period just before dawn when the dam’s floodgates upriver were closed, the water level would drop and the river thin. At some point, the locals had worked out that for those few minutes a raised stretch of riverbed was brought right to the surface and, in that brief interval before the floodgates reopened and the raised bed sank back beneath the rising water, they could use it as a shortcut. They’d walk from dry land to dry land seeming, to those not from this place, like prophets or saints: striding splendidly yet humbly over the waves.

As I dipped my foot to follow Bahr I knew none of this.

I went carefully, watching the Nile’s gentle waves in the moon’s light and trying to make out the sound they made, trying to remember the particular word for that sound. Was it ajeej? Haad? What had Alya called it? I tried to picture her saying the word and then imitating the sound. Singing it.

This was long before Bahr. I had awoken after a night spent in a friend’s apartment, to find that my friend wasn’t there. Not to say that I felt any of the fleeting trauma of opening your eyes somewhere unfamiliar—no: it was with a sense of belonging that I got up and moved through the apartment in search of the bathroom. Which is when it reached me—the sweet strong sound of singing from somewhere beyond the living room.

A woman’s voice, soft but with breadth, like an old-time dive-bar diva. And faint, too, like a murmur or a shifting of wings. Half-awake and half-bewitched, I followed the line of the song, and when I came to the kitchen doorway I stopped and stood, watching her.