For Elie Doolittle, the worst part of coming home from trips like the adventure in Egypt was forgetting the little details. She remembered the words to describe what she had experienced, but she regretted that she often forgot the memories themselves.

Then they would come back at the most unexpected times: the smell of a pile of garbage by Boston’s harbor wharves reminded her of that great bazaar in the Muslim Quarter of Qairo. The dust floating in the sun spears at Tripp’s Imports & Antiquities reminded her of the stifling heat and the dirt in her tent at camp by the Inverted Pyramid of Osiris.

When she sat down, however, to recreate the experience on canvas she utterly failed. The renderings were flat. The scale of the pyramids was always off: either distorted or too b...

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