Travel: Nile cruise

The Sydney Morning Herald (Ian McKinnon)

About 40 Australian tourists have just disembarked a Nile River cruise ship and are standing on the concourse of the magnificent Temple of Horus at Edfu, completed in 57BC to honour the falcon-headed god Horus, patron of the living pharaoh. It is much the same view Cleopatra would have enjoyed on one of her many journeys down the Nile to oversee her realm 2000 years ago.

The temple is Egypt's best preserved, but it wasn't always so. Over recent centuries dirt, sand and rubbish were allowed to pile up until it reached only a few metres from the ceiling.

In those years the people of Edfu were poor and uneducated with little concept of historical treasures, but they were smart enough to observe that the draft created there was excellent for incinerating rubbish. So they lit up and kept at it until the 1920s, when excavation began in a bid to restore the temple, by which time the compacted space was about only a metre deep.

Now the temple is buzzing with life, faded char marks on the ceiling the only sign of desecration.

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