Day 4: Abu Simbel and Aswan
After an early breakfast, transfer to the Cairo Airport for your 7 a.m. EgyptAir flight to Aswan (arriving at 8:40 a.m.), which connects to your 45-minute flight to Abu Simbel at 9:55. Your next guide will meet you on the flight and will accompany you through Day 8 (at which point, you'll meet up with another guide). A bus will take you from the airport to a village that's just a five-minute walk from the temples at Abu Simbel. Nothing, not the tour buses nor the heat (you are just 25 miles from the Sudanese border), can diminish the impact of these two savagely beautiful structures that were built into a mountainside on the West Bank of the Nile between 1274 and 1244 b.c. by Ramses II. The original feat is matched only by the skill with which the temples were cut into pieces and reassembled on high ground in the mid-1960s to save them from the newly dammed Nile's rising waters. The facade of the Great Temple of Ramses II (pictured right), with its four colossal statues of the pharaoh, seems conceived on a divine scale; it's both an overwhelming display of Egyptian imperial power in what was then ancient Nubia and a bold grasp at immortality by a pharaoh who was not interested in going gently into that good night.

The nearby Temple of Hathor is dedicated to Ramses' first and favorite wife, Nefertari, represented on the facade—unusually and touchingly in a culture where size signified stature—at the same scale as her husband. You can ponder the nature of ancient love on your flight back to Aswan, which departs Abu Simbel at 1:55 p.m. and lands at 2:40 p.m. (flight times may vary slightly).

Aswan is situated at what was in antiquity the southern border of Egypt, the point where the Nile cuts through the granite rock of the first cataract. (Nubia lay beyond.) You'll be spending the next two nights at the Sofitel Old Cataract Hotel, a splendid reddish-brown pile built by the British in 1899 (20-97-231-6000; sofitel.com; doubles, $265–$648). Make a reservation for dinner at the hotel's atmospheric 1902 restaurant, site of the Grand Ball in the 1978 film version of Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (20-97-231-6000; entrées, $11–$16), then spend the rest of the day luxuriating in the hotel's picture-postcard views of the Nile. The terrace is a must for lunch or a cold glass of karkadeh. (pictured bottom right)

Day 5: St. Simeon's and the Aswan Market
After breakfast on the terrace, walk down to the river with your guide to a waiting felucca, which will take you across to the western bank. From there, it's a 20-minute camel ride to St. Simeon's Monastery, the best example of an ancient Christian (Coptic) stronghold in Egypt. Dating back to the seventh century and abandoned in the twelfth because of difficulties with the water supply and Muslim attacks, the monastery is a wreck, but the setting—on high ground surrounded by desert sands—is splendid and the ruins have an oddly powerful aura. Note the marks in the cells in the upper enclosure: Here the monks once attached themselves by ropes to large metal rings, the better to stay upright and awake all night long, reading and/or praying.