West bank before heat. A balloon, a tomb, a river doing what it has always done.
Luxor is two cities divided by a current. I crossed at dawn for a balloon that drifted over fields still in shadow. Below, sugarcane; above, a silence that felt administered.
Stone that keeps names
In the tombs the air is older than language you arrived with. A guide traced a cartouche with a laser, which should have been vulgar and somehow was not. I thought about how this atlas treats coordinates as stories — Luxor has been doing that for millennia.
Evening on the east bank: tea, a caleche I did not take, the river the colour of hammered metal.