They've got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. They speak a dozen languages, know every local custom...

... They'll blend in. Disappear. With any luck, they're in Luxor already.

And we are! (Does anyone here speak English? Or Ancient Greek?)

After a bland dinner (was it fish? chicken, maybe?) and a couple of expensive beers in the smoky club car (where they blasted Middle Eastern pop music through the wholly inadequate tiny PA speakers such that it all sounded an awful lot like the most distorted tracks on the newest Tom Waits record), we spent a fitful night clanking and swaying our way south from Cairo. When our steward knocked on our cabin door at 5 AM to announce our approach to Luxor, we bore disappointingly little resemblance to either Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint.

We were rewarded for our pains, though, as soon as we reached the ancient and battered ferry to Gezira, by the view across the Nile of the day's first sunlight on the mountains that surround the Theban Necropolis. We gawked and swooned with pleasure at the beauty of the river valley at dawn while our fellow passengers, all locals in Bedouin dress to whom this glorious sight was familiar to the point of banality, nodded in apparent approval of our appreciation.

Alas, we've no culinary adventures to report, as minor tummy troubles have been keeping us on the white rice. (And just where do you find applesauce in Egypt?? Surely Indiana Jones would know...)