Cairo is a maximum city: twenty million people, traffic-honking gridlock, crammed and dusty apartment towers.
The blast could be heard eight miles away, and it sent a dusty cloud towering over the surrounding farmland.
In its towers of dusty papers and the petty tyranny of minor officials and door-keepers, it competes with anything imagined by Kafka or Dickens.
Many scenes recall the film strikingly, including one in the missing-persons bureau, where towers of dusty files drive home the hopelessness of Isabel's quest.
Visit any city in the country – there are over 650 of them – and you will soon be negotiating a route around a noisy, dusty construction site, beneath towering cranes.
For now, the students live in a glass office tower, a noisy, dusty 20-minute walk across several eight-lane roads from the purple building, which is already fading in the intense sunlight.
In the hot and desolate lands of Chile's Atacama Desert, seemingly lonely and lost, four huge metallic structures tower over the dusty summit of Cerro Paranal.
We arrived there just after midday, the neighbourhood a mass of half-built tower blocks, wide, dusty roads and scrappy little cafes.
We arrived there just after midday, the neighborhood a mass of half-built tower blocks, wide, dusty roads and scrappy little cafes.
On a dusty trek up to the Towers of Silence we learnt how, traditionally a priest would lay out the bodies of the dead on the open-air towers, to be picked clean by vultures – a ritual similar to that of the Tibetan sky burial.
