Mr. Conrad was, of course, a literary genius, whereas I was merely a schoolteacher. Imagine a hundred-foot rope, I would have told my students. Tie a knot in it ten feet from the end. That knot is Cairo. Now, to represent the Nile’s delta, separate the strands that make up the ten-foot end to form a triangle. The Nile’s length is marvelous, but when seen crossways from the boulevard, its width was unimpressive. And its depth? Well, in March, when I was there? Its depth was just plain silly.

Why, the Cuyahoga River is more to look at! I was thinking when a fresh round of shouting broke out nearby.

I have read that most travelers quickly come to feel a sort of detached immunity in truly foreign places, and I certainly experienced that myself. In the time it took to go from train station to hotel, I had come to the conclusion that Cairo’s unrelenting uproar was a phenomenon that could not possibly involve me. Then Rosie began to snarl, and I slowly realized our own arrival was the cause of the latest dispute. The combatants were a native doorman and my dragoman. Their field of battle was the stairway into the hotel. Fingers jabbed in my direction. Glares were aimed down substantial noses toward my luggage, my dog, and myself.

“I have a reservation,” I said in the voice I used to bring classrooms of unruly immigrant children to order. “I made all the arrangements through Thomas Cook’s in Cleveland, Ohio.”

Struck dumb, both men paused to stare at me.

“That’s in America,” I explained in the sudden silence.

For a moment they were joined in astonishment, as though they had just seen some revolting insect stand on two of its six legs and speak. An instant later, the dispute resumed; if anything, the attempt of a woman to take part in her own affairs provoked both men to further fury. The doorman, eyes and blood vessels bulging, blocked the dragoman’s effort to carry my bags into the hotel. The dragoman matched him in every particular, trying to gain entry by dint of volume and main force. Rosie’s high-pitched yapping adding to the bedlam.