It is most morbid to wish for Poirot while starting a trip to Egypt. Even though I had read Death on the Nile and re-read it just before the trip (because I am the kind of person who does things like that), I didn’t ever harbour the notion that I’d actually use any part of the book. Yet not only did I hark back to the book within hours of landing in the country, my last thought as I flew out was also that a man of his talent would have been good to have at hand.

In the book, just before he boarded the ship for a cruise on the Nile, Hercule Poirot shared a compartment with Miss Van Schuyler, “an elderly lady with a very wrinkled face, a stiff white sock, a good many diamonds and an expression of reptilian contempt for the majority of mankind.” A big, clumsy young woman under 30 was sitting opposite her. At intervals, the old lady looked over the top of her magazine and snapped an order at her. “Cornelia collect the rugs.” “When we arrive look after my dressing case. On no account let anyone else handle it.” “Don’t forget my paper cutter.”

Though I was going on a cruise on the Nile from Aswan to Luxor, in the exact opposite direction that Agatha Christie took Poirot and her characters on, and much as I hoped nothing about the cruise would imitate the plot of Death on the Nile, I stepped into the ship wishing someone had spoken these words aloud again.

If you think of a day as a period of light between two of darkness, it was my second day in the country. Yet, I had arrived in Cairo only a few hours prior, after a long flight from Mumbai. Within minutes of checking into the hotel, we were shepherded out for a fancy banquet. I remember stumbling into bed at midnight, and it seemed mere minutes had passed when the alarm went off at 2am. I had a flight to catch to Aswan.

It was at the airport that I realised how big the group was. A dozen journalists, about 25 employees of travel companies and some 50 intrepid Indian travellers were rubbing their eyes and queuing up to clear a security line, which was more than a kilometer long. At the head of the line was Brand Ambassador, none less than a Bollywood star. On the flight to Cairo, the journalists had concluded Brand Ambassador was accompanied by her personal assistant, a make-up person and hairdresser. I must admit I was impressed by the entourage. By dinner though, it was established that the media had got it wrong. The entourage was merely her friends — two of whom happened to be editors of celebrity magazines, and the third, an editorial spouse.

An hour and a half later, we landed at Aswan. That was when I first wished Miss Van Schuyler’s words were spoken. For Brand Ambassador had left her luggage outside the Cairo airport. She had expected the young organiser of the trip, let’s call her Cornelia, to carry her luggage for her. Cornelia, who seemed to have the impression that her job profile did not include the word ‘porter’, chose to carry only her own suitcase. After waiting for an hour at Aswan airport, despite the fact that we were sleep and caffeine-deprived, it became apparent to everyone that staring at the luggage carousel wasn’t going to make Brand Ambassador’s suitcase appear. There was nothing else to do but immediately divide ourselves into Team Brand Ambassador and Team Cornelia. Another hour of wait ensued, while the people in charge desperately looked around for possible scapegoats. Eventually, it was decided that Cornelia and one of the guides should share the blame. Eventually, we were told that we could proceed to item number one of our itinerary for the day, while Cornelia stayed back at the airport.

Unfortunately, things didn’t fare much better. The first stop in the itinerary was Aswan Dam. Both historically and economically, the 40-year-old dam is significant. For thousands of years now, the Nile has flooded annually, an event of such significance that even in temples built 1,500 years ago, the level of the river is dutifully recorded. It is the flooding of the Nile, which makes the Egyptian plains so fertile. Nature was all very well, but the unpredictability of the level of the flood began to annoy the Egyptians, and after a 10-year effort, the Aswan Dam became operational in 1970. It was all quite interesting, but if you’ve had only two hours of sleep and a four-hour wait for someone else’s luggage, it’s hard to be impressed. There was much tut-tutting, and the intrepid travellers’ bus declared that the Sardar Sarovar Dam was far better anyway. And so we boarded the bus and slept on.

The Philae Temple, our next stop, restored some humour. At last, it felt like we were doing something authentically Egyptian. The temple is dedicated to goddess Isis. She was the wife of Osiris, who was murdered and chopped into pieces by his brother Seth. Isis picked up the fragments of his body and brought Osiris back to life. She then conceived Horus. Osiris became the god of the other world, the judge of the dead, a pride of place in Egyptian mythology. And when he grew up, Horus avenged his father by defeating Seth. Nothing jumpstarts a day like some blood and gore. Eventually, the pharaohs and the gods would all merge into one long story of wealth, war and death, but at Philae, our first introduction to them was fascinating. It made me shudder, this idea that in 285BC priests and kings stood exactly where I was standing and saw exactly what I saw. But I had to snap out of it when the guide revealed that the temple was originally elsewhere, and troubled by the frequent flooding of the Nile, in 1980, the UNESCO moved it stone by stone to its new, dry location.

With all this negative public relations around the Nile, I was beginning to expect a whooshing, menacing river. But the Nile was so passive and so calming in its greenish-blue glory that it was hard to think of it as being capable of any destruction. Fortunately, unlike the temple, our ship was in the spot it was originally supposed to be, and after the day we had had, the sight of the tiny cabins and the tinier bunks generated so much relief that for a brief moment, in a ship with 85 Indians, you could have actually heard a pin drop.

In her pre-dinner speech that evening, Brand Ambassador informed us that like a plot in a Bollywood film, her luggage was rescued seconds before a bomb squad exploded it and was returned to her safely. The applause in the room was thundering. We sailed to Kom Ombo that night, relieved for the Brand Ambassador but still a little sorry for Cornelia, who was by then shunned by many. The Kom Ombo Temple is a two-in-one affair — one part is dedicated to the crocodile god, Sobek, and the other to the falcon god, Horus. The reliefs on the walls were painstakingly carved, and the priests, the pharaohs, the offerings to the gods and even the calendars were getting easier to spot and decipher. Attached to it was a museum of sinister, charcoal black crocodile mummies.

Each temple in Egypt is a treasure trove of stories and even non-Egyptologists can spend days studying a single wall. The intrepid travellers though devised another method. It involved 60 seconds of listening to the guides, 15 minutes of photography and an eventual hunt for a restroom or a café. This suited everybody. Tourism is one of the largest industries in the country, and up until the Arab Spring in 2010, employed 15 per cent of Egypt’s population. With the violence in Tahrir Square making news around the world, the number of visitors has plummeted to a third of what it used to be. More people in the cafés meant better business for everybody. Our guide, Remon, also confessed his English had grown rusty in the three years of economic downturn.

At Edfu Temple, we were greeted by a giant sculpture of Horus and scenes of war on the walls. The temple is believed to be built on the site of the great battle between Horus and Seth, our avenging son from the Philae Temple. A quick run through the large complex, a peep down the Nileometer, a step well that recorded the level of the river, and back to the ship. The Valley of the Queens and later, the Valley of the Kings, finally took us through the terrain of Egypt that looked familiar from Hollywood movies. The walks to the tombs — prominently that of Nefertari among the queens and Tutankhamun among kings — were short but treacherous on the uneven desert-like terrain. Kings and queens who reined Egypt from 1070 to 1550BC chose to cut caves through the mountains rather than build elaborate pyramids. Tomb theft was a real threat and the royalty did not want their afterlife disturbed by robbers and body snatchers.

Through these lessons of tomb-raiding and the proper use of ox-fat for mummification, we took more photographs and drank more coffee. Brand Ambassador sportingly trudged along too, but it couldn’t have been easy for her. The hordes of Egyptian men — hawkers and hangers on — outside the temples would have wreaked havoc on her nerves. On figuring out that the contingent was from India, they would yell, “India, India, hello, Kareena Kapoor.” The rest of us, not so lissome and luminant, took it as a compliment, but it is sure to have grated on the non-Kareena Kapoor Brand Ambassador.

I don’t know if it was because of the stories of intrigue, murder and mystery that we heard, but by the time we reached the Valley of the Kings, we had a story of our own — an Indian puzzle on Egyptian soil. Some people in the intrepid travellers’ bus had noticed that a middle-aged man was travelling with a teenager, who was not his daughter. The girl spoke only Bengali and managed to convey to the investigators in the bus that she was with “her uncle”. The man had been spotted with only a towel wrapped around him in the room, and the fact that he actively disallowed the girl from talking to anybody raised suspicion. Within minutes the news of this spread to the two other buses. The journalists thought up headlines, the tour operator — whose client the man was — washed his hands off the sordid saga. And through the temple pylons and darkened tombs, hordes of intrepid travellers tailed the man and the niece. Any gesture they made was subject of group discussions at the dinner table. There was much shock, horror and good intentions, and eventually calls for diplomatic intervention. It was resolved that as soon as we reached Cairo, there would be definitive action.

By the time his cruise ended in Shellal, Poirot had solved the mystery of who had killed the heiress Linnet Ridgeway. But when we reached Cairo, two ladies — let’s call them the Bombay sisters because they were sisters from Bombay — delayed the buses by an hour while they ate fried chicken at KFC. This put in jeopardy our visit to Khan el-Khalili, Cairo’s biggest souk. All things considered, bargains in Egypt being what they were, the intrepid travellers decided no matter what, the girl seemed safe and happy, and we should just proceed to buy some fridge magnets and silver bracelets.

We matched Agatha Christie’s cruisers in the disdain we showed for the temples and history of Egypt. Alas, we didn’t have Poirot to solve our little case. Like the Nile, quiet and sinister, it remains mysterious and unresolved.

Reach

Egypt Air flies directly to Cairo from Delhi and Mumbai. Apart from Air India, most Middle Eastern and African airlines also have flights to Cairo with one stopover thrown in. You can start the Nile cruise from Luxor or Aswan. Flights from Cairo ply to both destinations.

Cruise

There are some 600 cruise ships on the Nile. We were on one from Sonesta (sonesta.com/nilecruises). Check out reviews before booking and make sure you take one where the food is praised. There is very little access to restaurants on shore during the cruise.

BL Ink Tip

Go on the Nile cruise and then visit the pyramids at Giza. This makes it easier to understand and appreciate the country’s long history, and provides a sort of chronology to your monument run. Certainly read up a bit of Egyptian history before you go, else it’ll all be a forgettable blur of gods and pharaohs. I read The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson. While it’s a little dense, it’s worth plodding through. Reading Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile is optional.

( The writer travelled at the invitation of Ministry of Tourism in Egypt and Egypt Air. )

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