“Assalamou Alaekom,” she tried, laughing, garbling it.

“Assalamou Alaekom,” he corrected. It quickly became a joke between them. They laughed until she felt herself drifting, trying to stay awake but no longer able. The last thing she remembered was René saying something to her that she didn’t understand. She was too tired.

The next morning she awoke with a start. It was 8:00 a.m., and she was alone on the bed. She looked everywhere in the small room. René was gone and had taken all his things. She waited for several minutes to see if perhaps he was in the shower or the bathroom. But no. He was gone.

She pulled on a T-shirt and some jeans. She snuck out of the hostel. The new concierge on the morning shift gave her a cursory glance but said nothing. She went outside into a warm summer morning. She was still unsure what to do, whether to go forward with her trip or go back to America. The knot had returned to the pit of her stomach, and she again felt alone, sad, and vulnerable. She had made one friend, or thought she had, and now he was gone too.

The door to the church was open across the street. She had time. She wandered in. There were a few older people sitting in various pews. There was stained glass at the front, a hundreds-of-years-old depiction of Jesus raising his hands to God.

Alex sat for a moment, then closed her eyes and said a prayer. She wanted wisdom. She wanted guidance. She wanted to know how to proceed. She opened her eyes.

Nothing much had changed. She stood, bowed slightly to the cross at the altar, turned, and walked back toward the front door.

She was near her decision. She would return home. The loneliness was too much.

Then something caught her eye.

In the back pew, among the old people she had walked past was the lady from the train. The old woman smiled at her and raised a hand. She signaled Alex to wait, as if she had something to say.

Outside, Alex waited. The old woman came out of the church a few seconds later.

“Today you will continue on to the Camargue?” she asked, recalling the previous day’s conversation.

Alex hesitated. “Yes. Yes, I think so,” she said. “Unless I change my mind and go back to Paris. I’m thinking about-”

“No, no, no!” the old woman said sharply. “Il te faut continuer, ma chérie! You must go on. You must stay with your plans. You are young and pretty. The world is big and wonderful and waits for you. You will make many friends. You are a blessed person, I can tell.”

“Merci bien,” Alex said.

“If I had a gift, I would give you one,” the old lady said. “But I am old and not well off. So I don’t.”

“I think you just did give me a gift.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You remind me so much of my grandmother. It’s almost as if you’re her.”

The old lady laughed. “You flatter me,” she said.

“My train leaves in an hour,” Alex said. “To the Camargue. Thank you.”

“Good luck to you,” the old lady said. “May God always bless you.”

They embraced again. On her way to the train station, Alex stopped by a small grocery store. From a cheerful shop owner, she bought fresh bread, a packet of cheese, two apples, and some bottled water for the train ride. She had an eye out for René but did not see him.

On the train through the French countryside, in a compartment that seated six, she wondered what guideposts, what angels, had been on earth for her. Across from her sat a mother with a boy of about ten. They were French of Sudanese origin, Alex learned as a conversation developed.

Alex tried her next phrase of greeting in Arabic. They smiled and responded with kindness. Alex engaged the boy in a casual conversation and eventually traded one of her apples for a pear while the mother smiled. The sun was brilliant outside, and there were new vistas beyond the train windows that she had never seen before. She sat in rapt attention and watched a new part of the world unfurl before her young eyes.

She felt older this morning. More confidant. Her French was coming more easily. She realized that she was a more confidant young woman this morning than the frightened young girl she had been twenty-four hours earlier. She would never, for example, have traded the apple for the pear a day earlier; she would have been too withdrawn. And she also suddenly realized that the knot in her stomach was gone. Oddly enough, it had disappeared when she was walking back up the short aisle of the church in Saint Etienne, when the old lady raised her hand and signaled her.

Now, a dozen years later, her flight from Rome leveled out. It followed the Nile River and finished its descent toward Cairo International Airport. Alex stared downward and again surveyed the ancient landscape, almost able to taste the millennia of history that lay along the river. Distantly, southward, beyond Cairo, she thought she could see the Pyramids of Giza.

Alex guessed that the old woman might well have passed away by now. She wondered what had ever happened to René, whether he ever visited Martinique or Polynesia or America. She could never remember his last name and wasn’t sure that she had ever known it. But she recalled the first three words of useful Arabic that he had taught her.

Marhabbah. Assalaam Alaikim. Maasalaamah.

Hello. Peace be unto you. Good-bye.

Well, she mused, you could live your whole life bracketed by those thoughts.

And she wondered whether that whole experience with René in the hostel and with the lady on the train and in the small church, whom she might also never see again in her life, had prepared her for this trip to Egypt more than any other single experience in her life.

Alex passed through Egyptian customs, then immigration. The Egyptian security officer scanned her passport. He waited for something on a computer screen, and so did she.

Whenever she traveled on a fake passport, immigration unnerved her. She watched everything the agent was doing and observed every facial gesture carefully. She even watched his eye movements as he looked at his computer screen. She felt her heart race and felt her blouse moisten with sweat.

Then the agent closed her passport, handed it back, and nodded to her. He smiled. “Welcome to Egypt,” he said in English.

Moments later, she retrieved her baggage from a clanking, outdated carousel and soon found a young man from the US Embassy holding a piece of paper with her new name on it. She approached him, smiled, and identified herself.

They shook hands. As it turned out, there had been one other passenger on her flight who was attached to the US diplomatic section in Cairo. He was a man about ten years older than she. The driver was also waiting for him. Once he had found both travelers, the driver took Alex’s bags and carried them to a waiting van.

“I’m Mo,” the driver said as they piled into the van.

“Short for Mohammad, I assume,” Alex answered.

“Mo is fine,” the man said without humor.

“Well, at least they didn’t send Larry or Curley,” the other traveler said sotto voce to Alex, who had to suppress a smile.

Mo and Cairo traffic were perfectly suited to each other. The ride into the city was crazy, with hyped-up drivers often passing between two other cars in the actual lanes, as a static-filled radio filled the van. It was not usual to be in a stream of traffic four-cars-across on a two lane highway at sixty miles per hour. Alex and the other American in the van exchanged another glance. She checked that her seatbelt was tight. The driving was worse than what Alex remembered from some of her trips to Central and South America. The only worse traffic that she could recall was during her trip to Lagos two years earlier, where there seemed to be no rules at all.

“I wish I had a helmet,” she said to the other man.