4 ideas
There he must extract taxes by force for a government he despises, from Siwans who see him as the occupier's agent, while his Irish wife Catherine searches the ruins for Alexander's tomb. Consumed by guilt and futility, he finally dynamites the ancient temple, an act based on the real destruction of the Umm Ubayda temple in 1897.
A man who publicly renounces a cause he believed in, to survive, does not return to neutral. He carries a private verdict of cowardice that poisons his later choices. Because he has already betrayed his own judgment once, he cannot trust himself to act well. His later service becomes empty compliance, and his remaining energy turns into self-contempt that finally seeks a destructive outlet.
A native official who enforces an occupying power's orders on a subject people belongs to neither camp. The rulers see him as a disposable tool, and the governed see him as a traitor, so nothing he does earns him legitimacy. Read this way, his cruelty or passivity comes less from character than from a position built to make every action a betrayal of someone.
Catherine loves Siwa's ancient ruins and wants to befriend its women, yet she is blind to how Siwans experience her intrusion into their sacred sites and closed customs. An outsider who treats a place as a site of ancient glory to be uncovered overlooks its living people. Her enthusiasm itself becomes the source of offense and harm. Good intentions do not cancel the asymmetry of arriving with the occupier's protection.