In the beginning of Yousef Al-Sibai’s novel Al-Saqqa Mat (The Water Carrier is Dead), we follow a water carrier named Shousha, accompanied by his son, on his rounds in the quarter of El-Hosayneya in Cairo. First, he stops at the local water company standpipe to fill up his goat skins. He has several to fill and load onto his two-wheeled pushcart. In contrast to Shousha, the new tap attendant is a silly man who twirls his mustaches and never moves far from his seat next to the tap. Shousha is unimpressed. This man has never carried a skin in his life, nor filled a zir. He knows nothing of the craft of the water carrier. Prior to the founding of the first corporate water company in Cairo in 1865, the water carrier was the primary water infrastructure of Egypt. Investment in pipes, pumping stations and other facilities of water infrastructure modernization soon after seemed to herald the decline of manual water carrying. But water infrastructure modernization was uneven, and water carriers remained an essential part of urban life well into the twentieth century. Despite this, the water carrier remains largely unstudied. This is a considerable oversight, as the water carrier is vital to the history of water infrastructure modernization in urban Egypt. In this paper, I follow the flow of water on the back of the water carrier. Following the water carrier provides us with a history of water in modern cities that brings forward the contingent, manual, and human nature of infrastructure. It disrupts the assumption of infrastructure as manufactured and discrete object: cold, commercial, static, and passive. The water carrier delineates infrastructure as a space made and remade, a series of structures converging piecemeal, patched, and requiring maintenance, a place of persistent human effort and labor. Infrastructure is thus a space of perpetual ambivalence, and the water carrier’s necessary place within it highlights fractures in the modernity project. Indeed, photographs of water carriers in line at standpipes disrupt the monolith of modernity as infrastructure becomes a place (and space) to wait, as much as to move.