The boy didn’t reckon on the traveler’s compass though, which he now whipped out with a flourish. “I have no camera. I have no money. No passport. No Carte credite. I left everything in my hotel. The only thing I have—” He thrust the compass in the boy’s face, who winced as though expecting a blow, “is this. And it will do your job just fine. Ma’a salama.”

            The man had come from the north, and now he headed in that direction. Of course, in this warren, the streets often dead-ended or wound any which way but straight, but he tried to keep to that general heading. Soon, he came out onto a wider street, at least wider than the ones through which he had been hurrying. Shops lined either side, a thousand points of glinting metal that winked by as he passed through the brass makers’ souq. Cajoling voices brutalizing English, just come for a look. Dark eyes in dark places, watching.

            The man’s cunning plan with the compass fell apart when he finally reached the North Wall because the alley disappeared into it, terminating at an old ceramic absolution fountain laid out with squares of colorful tile. Nervously, he looked left and right, trying to get a sense of which path to take, but both choices veered steeply down slope, away from the wall beyond which he knew were air and light and open spaces. Two cats screamed at each other from somewhere within a moldering alcove. He hurried left.

Cul-de-sacs mocked him, circle lanes tricked him and sucked at the strength in his legs. His back was a palette of dust and sweat. Head down, he kept moving. Lilliputian doorways set in the mud-brick came up to his waist, leaving the impression that the buildings had sunk beneath rippling waves of worn stone. Peering inside irregular openings, he saw long, low rooms lined with straw and packed with clacking looms. Old women worked the looms, and as the traveler looked on, one of them fixed him with impassive eyes. Her face was covered by faded blue tattoos that dripped from the underside of her mouth and ran down her chin. The man stood. His feet felt numb, but they still carried him on, which was enough.

            Ten paces over broken ground encumbered with heaps of straw and rubble, buzzing insects. Ten paces further, tall buildings made of houses piled on top of houses produced geometry that made his head hurt. The sun couldn’t find the cobbles anymore, and the click-clack of the looms rising and bouncing from the leaning walls was suddenly the mad scrabble of chitinous legs belowground. The man felt logy, as though there were a fist pressed insistently, firmly, against his sternum. His eyes were dry and red.

             Then a familiar voice came from beside him, beside him and a little below: “Ten dirhams, no problem. I accept.”

            The faux guide had somehow followed the traveler all this way without gaining his attention. Now he looked delighted.

As the African days had passed by during this long sojourn, the traveler had taken on a motto with which any Muslim would agree: If it were written somewhere that something should happen, that he should go somewhere or see something or meet someone, then it would happen with no assistance from him. And if not, well then he’d never know anyway.

            It was the only way to live here. The man sighed. “Five dirhams to Qaraine.”

            The boy held out his hand, but the traveler shook his head. “After I get there.”

            The boy trotted back down into the medina. After a final moment spent weighing nonexistent options, the man loped after him. The boy was moving fast, ducking around black corners and into even blacker alleys as though trying to escape a pursuer. But ten minutes later, they stood panting before ornate wooden doors thrown open and towering against the merest sliver of sky. Once again, the boy stuck his palm out, and this time the man dropped four one-dirham coins into it. The boy’s smile vanished, but the man reminded him of his earlier thievery from the beggar. He nodded, slipped the coins in a pocket and said he would wait outside, maybe show the way to the tanneries or the water clock for a couple dirhams more. The man shrugged and said goodbye to him for a second time, knowing that it wouldn’t be the last.