With humor and insight, he began to interpret the street life for me, giving meaning to yesterday’s exotic chaos. The ladies’ long black garments, he explained, were allowed to trail in the dust purposely, to erase the tracks of their bare feet—in which an evil spirit might read hieroglyphs that could bring their families bad luck.

“Look at that,” Herr Weilbacher murmured, speaking close to my ear. I followed his glance and was amazed by the sight of a woman balancing on her head a large chicken coop—complete with chickens! A man walked a step or two in front of her, carrying nothing more than a cigarette between his lips. “Probably her husband, or perhaps a brother,” Herr Weilbacher said. “Egypt is a man’s world. Women bear all the burdens of Cairene life. Clay jars, children, baskets of goods … You are lucky, Miss Shanklin, to be independent and free. What an extraordinary woman you are to come so far—all on your own!”

We turned down a side street. For a short time, the noise around us diminished to the crunch of discarded pistachio shells beneath our feet and the ka-lop, ka-lop of delicate donkey hooves, followed by the rumble of wooden wheels on cobbles when a little cart passed by, laden with oranges. Soon, however, we entered an enclosed passageway where shouts and cries echoed against ancient stone walls.

“I think we will not go farther inside. Just look from here,” Herr Weilbacher advised. “It is too dirty for your pretty shoes.” That was just the sort of thing Mumma might have warned against, but on Herr Weilbacher’s lips, the instruction seemed to convey concern for my welfare and carried no implication that my own judgment was inadequate to the situation.

The covered bazaar was called a souk, he told me, and it teemed with jostling shoppers haggling over sacks of spices and beans, and piles of melons and cucumbers.