I've always thought it curious that you travel 'up the Nile' when in fact you are traveling south, but then I'm sure that is my own weird geographic egocentricity talking. In Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of the Nile, Lady Duff Gordon and her lady's maid, Sally, are traveling up the Nile towards the interior where it will be warmer, and thus much more conducive to Lady Duff Gordon's health, which is precarious. She is suffering from TB and is hoping the warm, dry climate will help bring about a cure. Nothing else has helped and now she is faced with years away from her family and friends in England.
Since it has turned colder where I live, and we've already seen our first snowfall (which has thankfully almost completely melted away), the sun and warmth of Egypt sound blissful. Egypt also sounds wonderfully colorful and exotic, and certainly to Sally's eyes the chaos and light amaze and seduce her. I have a feeling it is going to be Sally who is transformed rather than Lady Duff Gordon, though Sally is totally dedicated to her mistress. Sally is telling this story, and this is what she sees as she travels up the Nile.
"Those white hills, I see them when I close my eyes against the darkness of my cabin; that's the desert, I tell myself. The desert. The word itself is frightening. That's where the lush green ends, where the Nile, despite its abundance, cannot reach. Sometimes, as the sun beats down on our boat, Zint el-Bachreyn (I roll the words around my mouth again and again), and I look for somewhere to escape to, somewhere I can lie back and rest and not feel as though I am burning, burning--sometimes when I look across the water, across the cultivated land, and see those white hills, I am frightened. The desert, in all its blank enormity; the Egyptian desert, peopled as it is with the dead, with mortuaries, funerary temples, mummies in their tombs, workers in their graves. I have to look away."
Cold weather almost always makes me want to read 'warm' books. What is your favorite bookish destination at the moment? Egypt suits me very well.