Every traveler knows that some of the most moving and profound encounters she has in a foreign land aren’t with the living, but the dead. There’s something about having your equilibrium upset that makes the past seem closer, more accessible, and understanding that you’re walking atop the same ramparts, or down the same medina alleys, or over the same packed-earth streets as travelers from a century, two centuries, millennia ago, makes you feel both less consequential and, at the same time, less alone. Here I am, you think, one person of countless millions, and although my time here is brief, I too will have joined the others by leaving my footfall on this earth.