A crack team of architects spent years designing the innovative new high-rise hotel complex before you, its dimensions calibrated to mitigate the effects of this searing climate, its portholes intended to afford maximum shade. Whimsical touches include widow's walks with a samurai kabuto helmet motif. Soon the scaffolding will be removed, and photos of the environmentally sensitive adobe structures will be splashed across the pages of the world's glossy design magazines.

Okay, so you caught us in a fib. In truth, these towers are crappy—literally. Enter and you'll step into guano—lots and lots of it—since the only guests to flock to this gated community are doves by the tens of thousands. You are looking at so-called pigeon castles, the largest of their kind in a More on dovecotes[dovecote-crazy] Egypt[country]. While the ubiquitous fowl are grilled, stuffed with rice and wheat, or plopped into View recipe[casseroles]—a finger-licking-good delicacy in a land where digital dining is perfectly polite—the bird droppings themselves make for superb fertilizer (some fifteen tons a year get hauled out).

Indeed, the agriculturally rich fields around you have been cultivated for thousands of years. Date palms and indolent donkeys suggest that you are visiting a postcard-quaint oasis when in fact you're touring a Nile Delta[lotus-shaped sediment bed] the size of a small nation. To get here, you traveled north by road or rail from the capital, which Melville called a "contiguity of desert and verdure, splendor & squalor, gloom & gayety… too much light and no defence against it." If you continue north another two hours, you'll reach an Alexandria[ancient port city] where you can find your muse in the New Bibliotheca Alexandrina[mother of all libraries].

It's worth noting that pigeon breeders are assumed, according to local tradition, to be lying thieves who poach one another's birds, and as such they are not allowed to testify in court. So don't depend on them to come to your defense if you have trouble with the authorities.

And might we suggest you bring a parasol…?