Guard on the perimeter, keeping watch, keeping safe the march and soon to think it seriously uncool.

Up from the area we've become familiar with, shopfronts are boarded up and melons are bought and sold out the back of cars. She's been watching for a while. She knows exactly what happens next.

What if he isn't waiting for anyone, or going anywhere, he's just picked a prime vantage point with his back to the tiles and his eyes on everyone around him and on how strange everything is.

Expectations and fantasies disembark in backpacks and unwashed socks.

Middle of summer and quads are singing from midday on. The way her upper lip reaches down into her mouth it's almost like the thrum of those engines is her own.

Calypso steel coats the cobble with a cool silk and vibrates underfoot, like the volcano is waking up. It'll be different to hear it as a CD. Without the background noise. Without the kid crying over dropped gyros chips.

Ocean and sky run pitch into nothing, where people walk into what they think is everything. An island of edges.

Breadsticks in a paper bag give me a strange sensation. And it has happened before - where I nearly remember something, and I know it's there but I can't quite see it, and I know for a reason I can't explain it's important. But then it goes. And I don't know what it was, but I know it was something. All from breadsticks he meant only as a way to keep me coming back.

Twisting, fastening, untying, bundling - getting his old fingers moving like a bag of worms made him happy. For others it was a passing hell.

They say it's bad luck to walk under strung tentacles.

There's a bag of peaches, tomatoes and bread between her slippers, and, a moment ago, one finger between her eyes. She ran it down - her own sign, something of hers in here.

Flotilla arrives late and the only space for them here is in the water. They longline and see rocks, one of which is the cragged top of an earth-old mill, and there's a man pacing by the ropes with something on his mind, and the island gives off an incapable, or unwilling, light.

Ruined temples and pillars without roofs play to upturned sweaty brows like cobras out of baskets, but no one comes here, to see colour and faces and today's abandonment, to see evolution. Never restoration.

He says that if you don't buy... the great blue monster will open its great yawning mouth and swallow you whole. And if you don't read what you buy? It might just untie itself, ripple into the air, and fly until it finds you.

It is a state of emergency. Lines break out of single file and disperse in crashing waves; ten pairs of hands on one apple. Style, however, and poise, and restraint in the face of impending disaster (as disastrous as the last time) - that's all in the bag.

On the other side of the square he peeled serviettes off a sandwich of crumbling boiled egg and black olives. He ate quickly and without regard for flavour, though he seemed equally uninterested in the conversation of his peers. I don't know why, but I'm picturing heterochromia behind those shades.

Thousands of years ago, this early in the morning, goddesses unwrapped themselves and went lithe and slow down the ridge. Then they walked into the lakes, shawled and singing.

Up now where everything is some kind of blue; hard rocks under-paw. The chairlift was even harder.

It was, for a time, not permitted for churches to rise higher than the height of a horse. So his ancestors turned their heads to the ground and built down - the same ancestors who demand his own downwards gaze, their accumulated bulk straddling his shoulders. He obliges. And all the while, these people, these faces, who see his through a camera.

You think you're the only one in a place which makes you feel as though there's no one left. But even here there are others with the same idea as you, and rooms with ideas of their own, rooms bent out of all recognition.

When we left she was standing by the tracks with what looked like a cigarette. Train moves off, stick my head out like a dog, fingertips splay on the veneer like I'm waving through the wall. It isn't a cigarette. She's holding a stump of chalk.

It hides in the green with its HAL9000 star, and it is sorry, and it is afraid, but it isn't going anywhere either. It still feels it might take over.

A white sheet contours the shape of the altar like Magritte's Two Lovers - another place, another, that has nothing left but shape and love.

I walked between those tracks. I bent down and turned my hand over, turning the sharp of my knuckles to the metal. Still hot with the day's heat. Nothing to look at. Nothing amazing. But there was touch; the true sense of it, and a sense of being there, and of being the only one there in that moment.

Before the revolutions, kings and queens sat in palaces overlooking hedges and horses. Now they inspect queues and leave their groceries by pigeons.

Cactus fruit pulp is smeared under the tyre like the guts of an alien, some extraterrestrial that came all this way only to be run over by one of the many, many drivers here who have somewhere else to be. And fast.

A man watches over a civilisation somewhere in the sand, and is being paid very little for it.

Ahmed follows you in and down but you're looking up at the soles of his feet. The air smells cold, but isn't. Nor is it air. It's breath, long accumulated.

My own people. They’re the words I will him to think. Look at me and think them. Don’t think I’ve just turned in here because I’m lost. It’s the language that I’ve lost.

His private oath, the promise to himself he never likes to think about - and he isn’t entirely sure when he made it - is to fix the world without ever being noticed.

A city of twenty-two million, that’s in the day. At night two million leave and they go back to wherever it is they woke up. Every day. Every day he says he sees them go about their coming and going - I think he likes to give you the impression that, out here, he neither arrived nor left.

Give the kid the baguette. Go on. He’s hungry, he’s been dragged around for hours and the sun has only just come up. Go on, he’ll remember you. So I give him the baguette, which he promptly gives to the cameraman - who clearly can do without the extra bread, who swallows it whole. That kid idolises him. The boy didn’t want the baguette. The boy wants the camera.

Giving them a piece of her mind, a glimpse of her body; a whole other world of wisdom, never stopping to collect dust but kicking it up instead. She’s going places.

And on march the new travellers who do not stop. Well, perhaps for a moment; the right moment at the right place. And on they go. This is what humans are to the earth.

The cemetery is not quite walled in. New living works its way inside while death topples up and over and out. Everyone who walks here is in the middle of their journey.

Francis Bacon ribcage, teeth, greyed fuzz, and gullet - daubed onto the dirt like oil paint, heat rising and drying it from the inside out. City is a gallery and the floor is a wall. I feel dizziness, and distance.

No one is up early enough to see the eclipse. They’re all up late, really late. Entire families will be up and out at midnight. Children with footballs, old women with suspecting looks. For now we’re up here, over their roofs.

Reefs are colourful stillnesses, and they’re vicious: the coral spill their digestive systems out over each other, and whoever eats first grows on the skeleton of the dead. The same goes here for waste. It competes with itself. It lives, and kills.

Hussein climbs. He has smartly worn white so the limestone smudges don’t show. I look for equally elusive signs of fossilised fish in the chalk glacier.

People stand on their balconies and look down, but never expect to see anyone down there looking up. They don’t know how to deal with it when we make eye contact. But there’s no one there today.

Rain will never ruin the table because it never rains. Nothing interrupts proceedings. A game can go on forever, and it looks like this one has.

Soft-treading footsteps are blown away in seconds, and centuries of directionless wandering are lost to people like us. To he and I, who are only ever making money—or spending it.

Old cars appreciate in value when the new models hit the market. Mileage and missing parts are irrelevant; it’s the name that sells. Of course, if you can see a name under all that dirt.

Not that it’s legal, but things would fall apart without it. That’s the conclusion which he has arrived at. He and everyone else who has had to make fire out of sticks. I suppose you’d call him a parking attendant, though your ticket is a swift nod and his payment varies.

We’ll never know if we’ve shared an amazing coincidence because we’re too estranged to recognise it. Did I happen to walk by you in the morning, on the other side of the city, only to pass you again now, hours later? Give it ten years and we’ll have exchanged a glance.

Spiders, like blown-up bone fragments, glow moon-white and mad on our pillows - there’s no ideal place to sleep. And it isn’t as quiet as she said it would be. Then again she’s a loud snorer.

Everyone’s finishing breakfast. Hany is on the bonnet of his car, strapping poles and quilts onto the racks. I take the opportunity to excuse myself, to disappear behind one of the sculptures - enormous misshapen amulet; keeper in solid rock of ancient secrets and dead languages - to take a piss. Near my feet is a shell. In the middle of the desert.

An unadorned post seems to stand in spite of passing photographers, or perhaps because of them. Fences, walls - anything to distinguish between areas of the most important type of trade, and any area where I’m not getting in its way.

Tumble headlong out of the Metro, pass coins on the scanners beside the security gates, to here. I wanted mango juice. That was when I was thirsty. Now I feel like following a stranger and asking him to tell me everything.

We’re looking for the best deal on self-priming pumps. He’s looking for any giveaway glance that we might be considering other offers—he knows we know what street, product, and game this is. He’s cool.

His shoulders knead the air like dough, turning it over, letting it rise before pressing it back down. It’s his small way of getting back at a city that does the same to him.

Any moment now something wondrous is going to happen, he’s sure of it.

The rubbish on the streets is sculpture, it’s leisure. Public art, for the betterment of our view. View of life and how nice it is, and I haven’t got a window to look out of, but I have a whole lot of energy bar wrappers to throw out.

Turn to one side, see the life you put aside and talk to the host that’s in its skin. We are each other. Decisions, life paths; they are invisible. We stare right through them when we make eye contact.

According to her, the best time to cycle the city is three in the morning. Especially after a night out. She refuses to download the app which indicates which bicycle rental bays are still free, preferring instead an apprehension that cools her like the night air. So, crossing two rivers and streets, which in the darkness seem to all be guarding something, she risks it. For a half hour her phone in the front basket navigates in an antagonistically English accent. She gets to the bay closest to her unit. One space left, every time. Every time. That is what the streets here conceal, but would never admit to—a fondness for the clichéd ending.

Early morning. A lady looks with distaste at one of the stragglers from the night before, bottle in hand, hair across his croaking frog stomach. “The city had walls once,” she told me later, knowing only by the sight of me to use English, “but now it just has doors. Open doors.”

Around the corner from the larger square, they stream instead out of a bar that claims walls as floor. Standing room only. Crowded like a Cubist, dark and late night, red wine and tobacco.

A farewell to ten years, which lasts for ten seconds, makes me think. Makes me think of the room that’s opened up. I’m passing by this house. What if I stopped? What if, in ten years, I was the one with arms around my arms? So much of life is deciding on who to introduce yourself to.

I found a shrivelled pellet of old rice, hard and small and grey as a nail, stuck in the wheel of my suitcase. I found that yesterday, having wheeled it from Centrale to the bus to the edge of my bed. That was one the city had prepared earlier.

Which one of their lives is about to change forever, or just has, and are they in their circle talking about it, or wondering whether they will ever get the chance—or are they talking about nothing at all? If I joined them, if I take up just a little more of that portico, maybe it’ll be my life.

You don’t want to learn guitar, learn another language, learn the secrets to longevity. You don’t want to move in and split the rent. You don’t want to attend a workshop for your self-confidence, or to get rich quick, or to look after a pet, or to look for a lost one. You don’t want to buy a wonder-drug. You don’t want to try a pillow that will revolutionise the way you feel when you get up in the morning and come to terms with the fact that you do, in fact, want all of it. You want everything. You want so much of everything that life itself is frightening.

Way back in Cairo, edge of the Maadi market, I photographed a man crossing the road as if suspecting the ground of giving out beneath him. He went fast and light with one eye on his toes and the other where they’d land. I imagine him landing here. I imagine his entire world as the fragment of a pebble, too heavy for me to hold; take hold of. Three pyramids in a desert. One sanctuary on a hill.

I reached the end of wherever it was I thought I was going and waited in the trees, for anything. A monk to unlock the door and hobble in the other direction, a pair of snapback pigtails to slip past with the jangle of spray cans. The building, however, has other ideas. It is at lonely peace.

A proud father, wishing he didn’t know his child, that they had never met or, at least, that this was their first. Wishing the young lad was a better striker. He has been a good father, supportive, and he has a good and dedicated son. But this man is not a selector or scout or coach, and he doesn’t know anyone in the game. He sits all day opposite a computer. He stands to watch his boy.

Corporate man with spiritual leanings, walks upright and does not waver or hesitate, or hold back, or hurry. He knows where he is going—that doesn’t mean he can’t wish he didn’t need anything to get there. His face seems to say, “it’s all just a job in the end.”

“In that house,” says the old woman in Italian, “I learnt how to stew stomach. That’s a meal that keeps you walking even after your shoes wear out.” It all obviously required translation, and even once I’d heard the words in English I wasn’t entirely sure it had been translated correctly. No, she said that. The lady, statuesque, nose like a marble column and teeth like temple steps, is a relic of the ancient cuisine. Lampredotto—cow stomach—fuel of elderly women who walk high in the hills.

Everyone makes a run for it. Through the rain I can still hear that the square is busy, but I’m not altogether certain. Busy here is not the erratic, unordered type of busy. It is a cool and controlled, temperate kind. A leopard in a tree. And as if under the wild cat I move slowly, feeling that any minute I’m going to be leapt at. Someone has left gold unguarded. The roller doors are down. A footstep in a puddle behind me. I’m being watched, and sized up, and followed. And I’m hungry.

There’s an event on somewhere downstairs. Even without the looks they were giving me, I know I shouldn’t be up here. My first inclination is to imagine where I’m meant to be, and, whenever I end up getting there, if they’ll tell me the same thing. Or at least look me over in the same way. Maybe where I’m meant to be is where there’s no one at all. I’d like to lie on the top of one of those red roofs and wait for rain to slide me back down onto a street, any street, where I’d proceed to apologise—without any hint of excuse, and perhaps inciting rebuke—to an old lady who thinks I’m just another young kid who likes to misbehave. I just like places with nice views.

Streets back home don’t make way for bicycles like they do here. Or maybe they do, but the distances are that much greater I just don’t see them. I certainly don’t see helmets. What, on the basis of local knowledge, do they presume to know? That the number of tourists (who seem to outnumber them three to one) will break their fall, should an accident send them flying? Or that here, in the stone-walled echo of the Medici hymn, safety as a concept is unheard of? Hundreds of years ago they excommunicated dissenters and beheaded the wayward. Now they bicycle to work and think about all the tabs they have open, thankful that neither cars nor sunlight will get in their way.

I probably shouldn’t be here but no one is around. A dog barks. That’s a bad sign. It stops barking. Which is worse. The space it vacated becomes the receptacle for a liquid thin slosh of city noise, as if all of a sudden the chest of the hill heaved and collapsed with a cough from the city on the other side. It is my last day here—maybe I’m being overly alert. Either way I’ve come to rethink what, before arriving, was impressed upon me: the history of the area. Yes, it’s historic. Of course it is. But what they really mean to say is that nothing much seems to have changed.