Ibrahim arrived at the site before the sun had fully gone.
He had walked from the village, as he always did in November. In the summer months, when the heat persisted long into the evening, he sometimes took the motorbike, but November was cooler, and the walk was a good way to arrive. The distance was four kilometres from the last house of the village to the chain gate of the site, and the path crossed the edge of the cultivation zone before passing out onto the desert, and the transition between the two was part of what he valued about the walk. The cultivation zone had its smell and its sounds. The desert had its own. The walk allowed the shift from one to the other to happen gradually, through his body, so that by the time he reached the chain gate he was already in the desert's register.
He left the house at ten past five, his bag on one shoulder and the thermos under the opposite arm. The bag contained the logbook, two water bottles, the small gas ring and the tea things packed around the bottles to keep them from knocking, the wool jacket he would need later in the shift, and the spare torch batteries that he carried as a habit. He had been carrying spare batteries for eleven years and had never needed them. He continued to carry them.
The village track ran west from the main road between the last of the houses and then past the fields that belonged to his neighbour Mahmoud. The fields were planted with clover at this time of year, the new planting still short, the green barely visible in the fading light. He could smell the water in the irrigation channel that ran along the edge of Mahmoud's field, the damp smell of earth that had been wetted recently. The channel was drawn from the main canal that served this part of the cultivation zone, and in November the water in the canals was at a level that had nothing to do with the old patterns of the Nile — the dams had changed all of that — but which still followed a schedule based on the needs of the crops and the season.