A roof of thin slats blotted out much of the harsh rays of the sun here and cast the path in indigo shades. Hundreds of stalls and tiny shops did a bustling trade, and the scents of food and spice, animals and dung, were wet and heavy on the air. Although not unused to Arabic cities, the strange and displaced sounds in this medina continued to catch the traveler off guard. An argument in mangled French filtered through a lattice below a terrace upon which a dirty lamb paced; the Koranic chant of unseen children was the score for a dying donkey that quivered in an alley as a group of men looked on. The men watched the traveler as he passed by, and then resumed their discussions.

            The walls narrowed as they neared the tanneries, and soon stark buildings rose several stories overhead, their balconies draped with moss and spider webs of cracks. The only evidence of the tanneries came when the wind shifted and sent an acrid plume of vat fumes settling into the still air of the alleyway. The stench burned the man’s nose as the boy led him through an unmarked doorway and up a flight of stone steps. A windowless corridor, creaking doors, Arabic pop on an unseen radio, a canted stone balcony with the little guide at his side. And the man could only gawk at the sight that stretched before him.

The tanning vats were entirely enclosed by low, flat-roofed houses built with utter disregard for flow and symmetry yet all the more captivating for it. Hot air whistled across the faded stucco and entertained wheeling gulls above hundreds of large stone pits, each filled with unknowable liquids. Mealy stews of animal skins floated inside each pit. These were stomped and flung and slapped by fifty or sixty shirtless men sweating under the sun, legs glistening as they clambered from vat to vat. Just below the balcony, another group was in the process of flaying the skins from piles of dead sheep. From three stories above, it looked as though they were playing in piles of pink cotton candy.

            “There is everything in the pits,” the guide informed his client. “Piss, pigeon shit too!” he exclaimed, perhaps hoping for a reaction, which he did not get. “Look at them!” He stuck out a finger.

            Across the sinkhole was another tall building, another terrace. Thirty pale men and women milled upon it, arms full of buttery bags and purses purchased only moments ago, and sprigs of mint under their noses. Shutter-slaps and excited voices floated across the gap and broke the traveler’s trance. He glanced back and saw his little guide half-hanging over the low stone wall and staring at the hot earth, rapt. Watching the men work as though he had never before seen this tableau.

            “Hey.”

The boy straightened.

“Thanks.”

“It is my job.” He squinted into the sun. “What’s your name?”

“Alex.”

“You look like Indiana Jones, Alex.”

            Alex laughed. “And you look like . . . a damn little kid. What’s your name, then?”

            “I am El Asad to those who know me. It means the Lion!” he declared proudly, once again thumping that sunken chest. “I am the oldest brother of seven—” he began, but the man waved at him for silence. The faux guide sob story always started like that. Alex could have told Asad’s own fictional life story better than the boy could have told it himself—he’d heard enough versions of it to know. Maybe this one should begin with how his father had suffered a heart attack or something equally debilitating which forced him into guiding to support his family and aunt (who also lived with them, with her own children) and ending with a suitably sad recounting of his latest beating at the hands of the police. But the Lion was young, and after all, a lion; he could take it for now. Besides, he was doing his family duty, and that was what mattered.