Contact Admin. The thriving markets of Aswan. The grand archaeological sites of Luxor. The lush, ancient landscapes. Experience a luxuriously unhurried riverboat cruise in Egypt on the Nile. I detected a note of erotic innuendo, too: I was content to admire the view from my balcony at the Cataract Hotel in Aswan the next morning, and relieved that the Nile was sticking to gurgling noises.
There is nothing wrong with seeing a ruin from a distance, I mused, sizing up the Aga Khan mausoleum, golden-dustβcolored amid the arid dunes of southern Egypt. A turbaned old gentleman engraved on an intricately inlaid artwork right above my bed appeared to be pondering what he would sell me that afternoon in the souk.
The French doors to my wood-enclosed balcony creaked suggestively as the wind pushed them open. At other luxury hotels, immense staffs of engineers make sure creaking is eliminated. Christie wrote parts of Death on the Nile at this hotel, then continued aboard the steamship Sudan , which I was to board the next afternoon to cruise the Nile for four days, from Aswan to Luxor.
Arches opened onto lush gardens. I could have done with a little settee myself a few hours later at the souk in Aswan, while looking at scarves and capes and djellabas, my head swimming from the variety to which my relentlessly kind merchant subjected me.
This is, of course, what is meant to happen. One is not there, as in a mall, merely to get what one needs.
