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Death remembered the time before the souk. He remembered when the mud huts first appeared in the bulrushes along the Tigris. He remembered when the caliph Al-Mansur commanded the great city’s rise from the rose-pink soil, an impressive feat of human will. After a particularly busy work trip––filthy Europeans and their plagues––he had returned to Baghdad and discovered, to his delight, that the coppersmiths had constructed this narrow alleyway and lined it with their wares.