Our guide. Khalid was positively reticent by the standards of tour guides --- I must have been in and out of the room where he was loitering for ten minutes before he offered to take us around the site. Fairly early on he announced that he wanted to have four wives some day, but he couldn't afford them. I don't know if he was trying to increase his allure or merely set a boundary on the transaction. It is a conundrum of long standing, how to present heterosexuality in a society from which actual women have been systematically excluded, such as Islam, VMI, or the fifth grade boy's bathroom. Or Skull and Bones. You end up developing an elaborate gesture language, involving handshakes and wars and the like. It developed later that Khalid was a Christian and he couldn't have had four wives anyway. About this time he noticed that I was taking as many pictures of him as of the ruins. Well, what would you do, if your mother asked you?