Those mornings in Cairo, I woke to a world teeming, either the heat or the noise getting to me first. I got up to respond to it all. The Brandts’ estate was as sheltered from the sun as it could be, surrounded by palms and built around an inner courtyard – water slipping off the yellowed edges of plants each morning after they’d been tended – yet heat soaked into the ceiling tiles, reflected off the marble and radiated into the rooms. And the racket! The birds began shrieking at dawn, and the people were not much different. There was more yelling than I was accustomed to. More disturbing, there were insects so large that their wings and legs made noise around us as they whirred and caught.
I would dress and be in the kitchen by five each morning when the first kitchen staff arrived. I to
