The Valley of the Kings is a mob scene. Didier guides us instead to the valleys of the Artisans and the Nobles, where watchmen use broken mirrors to direct the sun's rays into cool, dark chambers, illuminating images from the past, and let us linger in tombs for as long as we like. This is the ancient Egypt I've longed to see: carved rivulets of plaited hair, the painted joke of a tabby cat stealing the pharaoh's duck eggs, yellow butterflies, and a farm girl removing splinters from her little sister's feet.

A ferry conveys us to the east bank, and we wander the stone forest of Karnak Temple. One hundred and thirty-four columns shaped like bundles of papyrus and lotus stems supported a massive weight on a shifting floodplain while symbolizing the primeval swamp where life originated. Aidan wants to see obelisks, Sophie wants to trace hieroglyphs, and Cathrine wants to take advantage of the twenty minutes of good light left before sunset. We all run off in different directions. Didier darts around like a madman, trying to explain everything at once. Keeping track of us in the vast complex is like trying to herd cats.

On our last day in Luxor, Didier takes us to meet his great friend and mentor, Alain Fouquet Abrial, a retired Egyptologist who lives on a white dahabeah moored on Luxor's urban corniche. Alain was born in a château in the Perigord. Despite years of academic training, he spent most of his career managing the Cairo Club Med. "Faced with the choice of spending my life in the attic of the Louvre or in Egypt itself, I chose Egypt," he explains. He bought his dahabeah in Luxor in the early nineties with a loan from a visiting friend, the Maharani of Kapurthala, who happened to have the cash handy in her purse. He wears black patent leather slippers, serves us tea, and is terribly kind to Aidan, who is squirming with a case of pharaoh's revenge. Alain lives alone but has a busy social life. He dines with archaeologists during the digging season ("They all despise one another") and hosts French politicians and assorted aristocrats on Nile sailing voyages.

"At my age, you begin to look at the other side," he says when I ask why he chooses to live on a relic. At first I think he is talking about his dahabeah's fabulous western view of palm trees rising above the Nile, distant temples, and purple-streaked mountains under the fierce blue desert sky. Seeing the melancholy in Alain's face, I know I'm wrong. He is contemplating the inescapable lesson of Egypt's river: The world is beautiful but unstable. Out of the life we build, death provides the sole gate to the eternal.