Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell Page A

that had crept across the desert and traveled along the Nile. Rosie watched me curiously from beneath a fold of sheeting.
    This is an ancient place, I thought, getting back into bed. There are souls here who cannot find their way.
    It was utterly unlike me to think that way, but I swear that’s what came to mind. From my present vantage, that dream makes perfect sense, but at the time? I shook off the unease and settled onto the pillow.
    “A late supper’s nightmare—that’s all,” I told Rosie. “A bit of Mr. Scrooge’s undigested cheese. It was a dream. Just a silly dream…”

          L IE DOWN WITH DOGS , rise up with fleas,” Mumma used to say. She was referring to moral corruption that came of falling in with bad companions, although she also thought that people who let their dogs sleep indoors were asking for trouble.
    Ah, but those who lie down with dachshunds rise up with smiles, even if their own night’s sleep has been disturbed. Dachshunds are structural comedians; their very existence is a cause for amusement. In the full light of morning, I awoke to the spectacle of Rosie lying flat on her back: pointed nose in the air, stubby forelegs folded demurely across her chest, hindquarters sprawled in lewd abandon.
    “Trollop! Just look at you,” I murmured, stroking her belly. “No wonder Arabs think short dogs are odious.”
    Waking, she rolled over. Yawned, her long tongue unfurling like a paper noisemaker. Stretched, a two-part motion: first fore, then aft. A cylindrical shake from one end to the other, and she leapt into my arms, all exuberance and kisses, as though we had been cruelly parted for days, not sleeping in the very same bed all night long.
    Someone just outside my door must have heard my laughter, for there was a tiny knock and a piping voice. “Walk you dog, madams?”
    I pulled on my dressing gown, lifted Rosie, and opened the door to a small boy wearing a barely respectable white cotton shift and sandals. This little capitalist held up a worn leather leash, probably scavenged from some European’s trash. “Yes, madams? Walk you dog?”
    Rosie customarily barked at strangers, but perhaps she did not yet consider the hotel room entirely her own. And this child had, after all, uttered a magical word. She looked at him and then up at me, trembling with anticipation.
He said ‘walk,’ Agnes.
    “How much?” I asked.
    We quickly brokered a price and I attached his leash to her collar. Before I even learned the boy’s name, he and Rosie raced down the corridor toward the stairs.
    I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I simply presumed that the concierge had sent the boy. When he and Rosie failed to reappear by the time I’d washed up and gotten dressed, dreadful possibilities began to occur to me. Was this how poor Egyptians obtained meat—by walking foreigners’ dogs? What if the boy held her hostage and demanded a ransom? What if the doorman of the Semiramis had sent the boy here to execute the offensive animal? That was absurd, but still…
    Idiot! I thought. Why didn’t you call the desk clerk before sending her off with some little stranger?
    Five more sickening minutes, and I left the room, hoping at every step to hear a child’s pounding footfalls and Rosie’s scrambling scamper up the staircase. With no sign of them three flights down, I was close to frantic as I approached the concierge. “Sir, I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I began, embarrassed at the quaver in my voice.
    Just then I heard a deep male voice cry,
“Ein Wursthund!”
right outside the hotel door. There was a stream of delighted German followed by a question in Arabic that was answered by the boy, who entered the lobby and lifted his chin toward me.
    The German gentleman appeared with Rosie draped happily over one strong forearm. He was a rather handsome person, quite tall, and broad in the chest. My age. Perhaps a bit younger. When he saw me, his smile widened beneath a