THE DESERT’S a fertile place for internet scams:

Hossam works in the hotel; tall, suave, genuinely interested in why I’ve come. One morning he shyly shows me his correspondence with “The United State of America Lottery,” located on E. Post Road in White Plains, but headquartered in Nigeria. They told him he won $500,000.00, and after he inquired about it, they became increasingly importunate. Now they’re texting him demands for “good faith” money. They warn they’ve already informed the “Egyptian High Commissioner” of his winnings.

Up the road, in Bahariya, Essam has no prospects at all, whiles away his days in a dim, grimy internet café stocked with plodding PCs that appear to date from the Middle Kingdom. “Chatting” with “girls.” He’s also following up a promise for a job as a waiter in London, at the Ambassadors Hotel. He has to pay only for the immigration application. I look into it for him, and it too tracks back to Nigeria.

Both guys are smart and speak English, but it’s not their first language and they can’t identify the solecisms, in language and in assumptions about the way the world works, that would be ludicrous to a First World native speaker. Most of the world’s English speakers aren’t native; many are strivers marooned in places with few outlets for their ambitions. The internet and the English language are their only connections to the outside world. Hossam and Essam both are grievously disappointed when I tell them they’ve been scammed: another door closes. They feel foolish, possibly even humiliated by their gullibility, even more humiliated by their hopelessness.