Life on the passing banks gives you a direct connection with the past and tells you that time is greater than any individual you are given an intimation of your own mortality and unimportance. The ancestors of the farmers you see tilling the land and working the water wheels would have been doing the same when the surrounding monuments were being built by the pharaohs. The evidence is all around if you take a cruise up the river. It is also the most extraordinary example of living history in the world. The Nile has always been a particularly good place to experience that mystique. Africa has a wildness about it that the cultivated lands of the northern hemisphere lack. All of it shares a mystique that is to do with being bound together by great rivers, animals - the territory of the African lion, for example, used to extend from north to south - and a savage spirit that is all-pervasive. I have always seen Africa as a single horse-headed continent. Yet Egypt is as African as the Cape of Good Hope, where I live. Many of my readers find it difficult to equate Egypt with Africa. Novelist Wilbur Smith, who first visited Egypt in 1963 and has visited many times since
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