Free Amore and Amaretti by Victoria Cosford

outskirts towards the Pyramids of Giza. The guide tells us that Napoleon calculated there would be enough stones in the three main pyramids alone to build a three-metre-high wall around the whole of France. I nearly faint on the narrow circular staircase winding up inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, pressed sweatily between large German bottoms and vigorous American thighs. We gaze at the sprawling splendour of the Sphinx and purchase little scrolls of printed papyrus from the Papyrus Institute.
    From Cairo we catch the train and follow the Nile down to Luxor, a village-city whose very name evokes dusty musky sensuousness. We visit the bewilderingly vast architecture of the Karnak temple complex and roam through the bleak and arid landscape of the Valley of the Kings; at night we eat carp and rice washed down by pink wine that tastes like turpentine. Aswan is our end of the Nile; we had hoped to travel as far down as the High Dam at Abu Simbel, but the minute we glimpse the Old Cataract Hotel we decide we are going to stay there for ever. We sit on the cool verandahs of this enormous orangey-pink Moorish-style building sipping gin and tonics, staring at giant palms in gracious grounds and the Nile before us with its gently bobbing feluccas.
    Of course, we know we cannot stay for ever at the Old Cataract – we must return to Rome and our ordinary lives, and we still have a week in which to explore the Red Sea. And so we catch the bus through a monotony of desert, Ignazio ashen-faced from the stomach cramps he has mysteriously incurred overnight. From there it is – and we should have read the signs – downhill all the way.
    It is by the Red Sea that I throw away our return air tickets to Rome. More accurately, it is in the foyer of the Sheraton Hotel just outside the Egyptian deep-sea diving resort of Hurghada. Ignazio and I have been tipped into its muffled beige luxury from the taxi that rescues us from the bus stop. Ten hours of a bumpy journey across the Arabian Desert mostly standing up has left us fragile with exhaustion. Propped at the main desk of the Hurghada oasis attending to the necessary formalities, I plunge both hands into the pockets of my jacket and empty their contents into the nearest rubbish bin, as if ridding myself of the chaos and clutter of the past day.
    We only discover about the airline tickets the following day when, refreshed from a good night’s sleep, we decide to organise ourselves for the home run to Cairo before flying back to Rome. When we stop panicking, we start to make phone calls: to both Italian and Australian embassies in Cairo, to Ignazio’s parents in Florence – and incomprehensibly not to the airline company.
    Our holiday funds have almost disappeared; we move out of the Sheraton and into the shabby Shedwan Hotel, where loose wires droop out of holes in the peeling bedroom wall, and slink several days later onto a Cairo-bound bus. At least we have the assurance of new airline tickets furnished by Ignazio’s generous parents awaiting us at the airport. But meanwhile we have a day in Cairo, and so book into the Anglo Swiss Pension, a seedy hotel in a scruffy part of town. It is while we are sitting on the sagging bed biting into tomatoes and bread purchased earlier from a street stall that I have a sudden vision of the Sultan’s Breakfast a fortnight previously. I had taken a photo of Ignazio sitting semi-naked on the giant bed of the Nile Hilton, framed by a line of golden pharaohs on the dark, wooden bedhead behind him. The bedlinen is crisp and white, the table pulled up to the bed has a gold linen cloth folded neatly over it, and from it Ignazio is spooning sugar into a cup from a silver bowl. Filling the table are more silver bowls, glassware, my carelessly crumpled napkin.
    At least we have the tickets home.

    Scalda piu l’amore che mille fuochi
    Love burns more than a thousand fires

    Back in Florence, the days shorten and I find myself in