She has been watching him for nine months without speaking, without being told what to look for. He does not yet know how to give it to her.

Mohenjo‑Daro was one of the largest cities in the ancient world — home to perhaps forty thousand people at a time when most of humanity lived in villages. It had the world's first urban drainage system, with clay pipes running beneath every street. It had a Great Bath lined with bitumen waterproofing. It had no palace, no temple, no monument to any king, and no one today can read its script or pronounce a single name. What it did have were craftspeople whose micro‑bead drilling technique was so precise that modern archaeologists initially refused to believe it was done by hand. They were wrong. It was done by hand, with a bow drill tipped in a stone called ernestite, in courtyards just like this one. ...