Behind the postcard Pyramids, 14-year-old Sayed works the dusty alleys of Nazlet El-Semman with Khufu, the camel who keeps his family fed. When Khufu collapses on the Giza Plateau, Sayed is torn between selling him to a slaughterhouse and leaving him by the notorious Wall of Carcasses. At dawn his mother, Ikram, gathers the women of the neighbourhood for something else entirely. Mahmoud Assi gives a pharaoh’s name to a camel nobody else will mourn.