The rooms at the Egyptian Museum full of richly adorned sarcophagi and gold funereal masks and royal jewelry and mummies and statues and thrones and coins and artifacts from intact tombs, such as that of Tutenkh-Aman discovered by Howard Carter, and other exhibits from the Egyptian dynastic periods of the Old Kingdom to the Greco-Roman occupation wrung fascination from me. I finally understood why the French and British and the world at large had caught a terminal case of Egyptian fever.
Interspersed between the immersions in ancient Egyptian history, Waleet also took us to a carpet shop and, giving us prior warning, an antiquities shop full of papyri and cartouches and other “artifacts” for purchase at bargain prices, and the maze-like Khan el-Khahili souk which was bewilderingly mesmeri
