This passage describing pre-Napoleonic Cairo, from Geoff Manaugh’s review of Nina Burleigh’s book Mirage grabs me by the subconscious:

You knock two or three times — and then crawl through a small circular door in the middle of a brick wall that could just as easily have been the entrance to a building. And then you’re gone, hiking through a part of the city you’d never even heard of before.

I just can’t get enough of neighborhoods divided from one another by hobbit-doors. I’ll be spending a LOT of time in Imaginary Cairo for the foreseeable future.

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