The little opening between the buildings is less than five feet wide, sixty feet high and impenetrably dark. It looks more like a fissure in a mountain wall than an entrance to a city thoroughfare. It has, like a cave, that same sense of things hidden underground.
The dawn in the square where I stand alone is still that ashen, unhealthy grey that precedes the truer light, and so when I step into the intense darkness of the path the effect is invigorating; instead of being smothered by the gloom I feel freed by it. The slight breeze I have left behind is replaced immediately by a stillness of air, and a more profound silence. The workaday passage seems somehow like hallowed ground, and if a companion were with me, we would whisper – there is a certain combination of place and time that instinctively invites quiet.
I can barely discern anything in the light so I put both hands out to touch the concrete walls either side. But what is there to see anyway? This district holds no important sites, no mosques or grand relics of another age. It’s a silent, residential lane outside the boundaries of the old city on a Tuesday morning.
As if to compensate for this I allow my imagination to inject the scene with some element of danger. In these stealthy, early morning hours, in a place unknown to me and far from home, anything could lurk unseen. So when I look back down the lane towards the square the light is framed dramatically, like an escape route.
But when I take an even narrower turn-off the small residential courtyard at the end of it is enclosed not by intricate, timbered doors with important-looking locks, but modern ones flanked by little flower pots. Instead of being faced with a fateful choice, each door leading to some Herculean test of combat, or some game of riddles, these doors house sleeping families, the only beast a cat glowering at me from a doormat.
My childlike narrative dissipates as I stand staring at the doors dumbly, thinking what I would say if a homeowner appeared for a morning cigarette. Instead I am content to linger here, serenely existing without purpose. Before the day crowds the mind with noise and heat I have this precious, simple contentment that comes from observing and not being observed.
Back in the main passage and something is coming. I hear his footsteps before I glimpse him. My first fellow early-riser is an old man loping uncertainly along the cobbled lane, head cast to the ground. The conical hood of his djellaba is distinctive and makes him look important, like some medieval monk on a secretive errand. We are being funnelled towards an inevitable encounter by the narrowness of the street and I stand still and watch him draw nearer. The deep folds of his hood keep his face hidden, even as I hear his heavy breathing rise and fall. He passes me as if I wasn’t there. The watchman on his way to work is late perhaps.
But sounds now encroach on the quiet. As if the man’s passage is an alarm call the lane has begun to stir. From behind barred windows and flaking doors come familiar sounds: a kettle whistling, the clatter of cutlery placed unceremoniously on a table, chairs scraping hard floors. A mother harangues her child, her voice imploring, and a man coughs violently as a showerhead splutters to life. These private sounds ring clear and true in the growing light, reassuring in their familiarity, and the world seems a more normal place now after the insomniac walker made slightly sinister by the silence and the dark.
At an empty crossroads a little way ahead some remnant of the past – a tiny alcove and its drinking fountain rimed with dust. Its position at this little junction must have made it quite the meeting place, its tinkling water cover for all manner of whispered conversations. But time has dulled the colours of its intricate tiles and made the damp place forlorn: an unloved ornament of the past too big to be carted off but not small enough to go unnoticed.
I continue downwards towards a chink of blue light. I peer down a turn-off that peters out to an impassable jumble of timbered beams. At another little crossroads I hear someone cross behind me, moving at right angles. I consider turning back to see who it is but something stops me. Was it the old man? Is this neighbourhood just him and me? Up that way, down this way, missing each other by seconds: two strangers trapped in a real-life game of Pac Man destined never to end.
But my little dawn journey is over, for day is here. Whatever sights there are to be seen from hereon will be shared. No longer anonymous, I will be the one examined. The murky grey of that first light belongs to another moment, another day.
Emerging from the dark of the labyrinth the end of the neighbourhood is marked by a ledge hugged by an allotment. Beneath a drop of a hundred feet the ancient city sprawls before me under a lightening sky. The towering mosques and minarets, burnished with a golden light from the east, point skywards like the oldest rockets in the world.
faroverthewater. 
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