Loti begins at midnight before the Great Sphinx, then wanders through a Cairo already being modernised, its mosques, its hall of royal mummies and the tombs of the Apis bulls. He sails up the Nile among women carrying water jars and ends at Philae, where the temples of Isis were being submerged behind the new Aswan dam.
A melancholy, gorgeous travel book from 1909, mourning an Egypt the author felt was vanishing. Download the free EPUB.