No one there dreads another.

This land, without an opponent,

Is where all of our families rest

Since the beginning of time.

Those who will be born after millions and millions,

All shall go to it!

—From the Tomb of Neferhotep, as translated by Professors Colleen and John Darnell

MY MOTHER, WHO lived and died by superstitions, used to make us say together before we went on a trip: We’re not going anywhere. It was meant to trick the Devil. I can’t say I believe in that kind of thing, but then again, I didn’t say it before I left home, and look at where that got me.

Walking outside of the airport in Cairo in August feels like stepping onto the surface of the sun. Even late at night, the heat is a knife on your skin and comes in pressing waves. I can already feel a line of sweat running down my spine; I didn’t come prepared for this. I find myself in the middle of other people’s transitions: a rumpled, dazed group of tourists being herded into their minivan; a teen dragging duct-taped luggage from the back of an open cart to the curb; a woman securing her head scarf as it blows in the breeze.

Suddenly I am surrounded by men. “Taxi?” they bark. “You need taxi?”

There’s no hiding the fact that I’m a Westerner; it’s clear from my red hair to my cargo pants and sneakers. I nod, making eye contact with one of them, a driver with a thick mustache and a long-sleeved striped shirt. The other taxi drivers fall back, seagulls in search of another crumb.

“You have suitcase?”

I shake my head. Everything I have is in the small bag I carry over my shoulder.

“American?” the man replies, and I nod. A wide, white grin splits his face. “Welcome to Alaska!”

It is startling to think that fifteen years have passed, but that lame joke is still the go-to gag for visitors. I get into the backseat of his car. “Take me to Ramses train station,” I say. “How long?”

“Fifteen minutes, inshallah.”

“Shokran,” I reply. Thank you. I am stunned at how quickly the Arabic comes to my lips. There must be a space in the brain that stores the information you assumed you’d never need again, like the lyrics to “MacArthur Park,” or how to multiply matrices, or—in my case—anything Egyptian. When Meret was little, she used to say lasterday, which might mean five minutes ago or five years ago—and that is where I am right now. Like I stepped back into the moment that was left behind when I abandoned this country. Like it has been waiting all this time for me to return.

With the window down, I can already feel dust settling on me. In Egypt, everything is covered in sand—your shoes, your skin, the air you breathe. It even gets in your food. The teeth of mummies are worn down by it.

Although it is nighttime, Cairo is alive in all its contradictions. On the highway, cars share the space with donkey carts.

Butcher shops with meat hanging outside cozy up beside souvenir stands. A souped-up muscle car zooms past, leaving a throb of rap music in its wake that tangles with the loudspeaker reverb of the salat isha, the nightly Muslim call to prayer. We drive along the Nile, trash stewing on its banks. Finally, Ramses Station comes into view. “Fifty pounds,” the driver says.

There are no set taxi fares in Egypt; the driver tells you how much he thinks the ride is worth. I pass him forty pounds as a counteroffer and get out of the car. He gets out, too, and starts yelling at me in Arabic. “Shokran,” I tell him. “Shokran.” Even though this scene is common and nobody bats an eye, I feel my pulse racing as I walk up to the train station.

It is not easy to get to Middle Egypt as a Westerner. Tourists are not supposed to use the trains, so I don’t buy a ticket and instead wait for the conductor to find me and play dumb. At that point, the train is already moving and it’s too late, so he shrugs and lets me pay. Hours later, when I get off at my stop, in Minya, I am the only white person in the station. I’m nearly the only person in the station.

I was supposed to arrive at 2:45 A.M., but the train has been delayed, so it’s just after 4:00 A.M. It feels like I have been traveling for twenty-four hours straight. The only taxi driver at the Minya train station is playing a game on his mobile phone when I knock on his window. He takes one look at me, rumpled and dragging. “Sabah el-khier,” I say. Good morning.

“Sabah el-noor,” he replies.

I give him my destination, a little over an hour away. He takes the eastern desert road out of Minya. I stare out the window, counting the gebels and wadis—hills and valleys—that rise in the darkness at the horizon. At the security checkpoints, where boys too young to grow a beard hold battered old machine guns from the sixties, I wrap my scarf around my head and pretend to sleep.

The driver keeps stealing glances in the rearview mirror. He is probably wondering what an American is doing in a taxi in the heart of Egypt, the one section that isn’t on tourist itineraries. I imagine what I might say to him, if I had the courage or the language to do so.

One of the questions I ask my clients is What’s left unfinished? What is it that you haven’t done yet, that you need to do before you leave this life? I’ve heard nearly every response: from fixing the front door where it sticks to bathing in the Red Sea; from publishing a memoir to playing a hand of poker with a friend you haven’t seen in years. For me, it’s this. This dust, this tooth-jarring ride, this bone-bleached ribbon of landscape.

In a previous life, I had been planning to be an Egyptologist. I fell in love with the culture first, when we studied Ancient Egypt in fourth grade. I remember standing at the top of the jungle gym and feeling the wind and pretending that I was in a felluca, crossing the Nile. My prized possession was a guidebook from the Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh exhibit that my mother had found at a secondhand bookshop. In high school, I took French and German, because I knew that I would need those languages to translate research. I applied to colleges that offered Egyptology programs, and studied on full scholarship at U Chicago.

Most of what I learned about Ancient Egypt can be boiled down to two subjects. The first is historical—Egypt was ruled by thirty-two dynasties of pharaohs, split across three main time periods: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. The First Dynasty began with King Narmer, the pharaoh who unified Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 B.C.E. The Old Kingdom is best known for being the time the pyramids were built as tombs for the kings. But around 2150 B.C.E., civil war broke out in Egypt. There were forty-two separate territories—or nomes—each headed by a nomarch. During this period, each nomarch was fighting for his own nome. There were alliances, but the pharaoh in the north didn’t rule over a unified Egypt; instead, it was like the Egyptian Game of Thrones. The Middle Kingdom began when a king named Mentuhotep II reunified Upper and Lower Egypt around 2010 B.C.E. That lasted until the Hyksos invaded from the north and a period followed where rulers were from foreign lands. It wasn’t until King Ahmose crushed the Hyksos that Egypt was reunited again during the New Kingdom, in 1550 B.C.E.

The second key subject involves Ancient Egyptian religion. Much of it was related to the sun god, Re—who, as the sun, was pulled across the sky daily in a long boat called the solar bark—and Osiris, the god of the Netherworld. Osiris was also the corpse of the sun god, and so they were flip sides of the same coin. This was not a logic bomb for the Ancient Egyptians because Osiris and Re were simply two faces of the same entity, like the Christian trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Every night, Re visited Osiris and reunited with his corpse, which powered him up to make the sun rise the next day. The Egyptian model of the afterlife imitated this cycle: the deceased’s soul was reborn daily like Re, and reunited nightly with its corpse.