At the end of chapter 18, we meet a character described as a Berber. More specifically, he would have been one of the Siwi, also known as the Oasis Berbers. Egypt's 30,000 Siwi are based in the Siwa and Qara Oases and speak Siwa. Per Wikipedia: "The Siwi community is the most distant concentration of Berbers from their historical national homeland in the Maghreb that is still in existence today." Because their oases are so far from Cairo, the Egyptian government had little influence over them before circa 1928, so well after the setting of this book. While my fictional Berber speaks Arabic, in reality, the Siwi at the time probably spoke very little Arabic, if they spoke any at all. Fun fact: the Berbers are also called the Amazigh, which sounds way cooler.
