Egypt has all the elements to captivate the traveller and animate the writer. It is an antique land stretched along one of the great rivers of the world that runs through a trackless desert, littered with the remains of a great civilization. There is enormous contrast between the green and still agricultural Nile valley, the empty desert wastelands and Cairo, one of the world's greatest and most densely populated cities.

Egypt has been visited, marvelled at and written about by innumerable authors, artists, archaeologists, soldiers and diplomats from Herodotus to Gustave Flaubert and Paul...