Edfu

The cruise ships moor at Edfu and disgorge their passengers into waiting horse carriages, and the whole procession clip-clops through the narrow streets to the temple and back in about forty-five minutes. I came by felucca, arriving on the western bank at mid-morning and walking across the old bridge into town, which meant I arrived at my own pace and had no carriage waiting and had to find my way through the souk by asking directions. The market district around the temple sells plastic Horus statues and cold drinks and fresh bread from a bakery whose chimney was putting out a good smell, and I stopped there first, which was the right decision.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu is not the largest temple in Egypt, but it is the most complete — built during the Ptolemaic period between 237 and 57 BC, which makes it almost recent by Nile Valley standards, and that relative youth is what saved it. When the sand covered it over the centuries and the mud-brick houses of later inhabitants built up around and over it, the burial preserved the structure perfectly. It was excavated in the nineteenth century in substantially the condition in which it was sealed. The result is extraordinary: a temple where the roof is intact, the naos chamber exists in its original form, and the walls rise to their full planned height. You can stand inside the inner sanctuary where the cult statue of Horus once stood and understand what a functioning Egyptian temple actually felt like — dark, enclosed, smelling of stone and something dried and ancient, the scale designed to diminish the worshipper and magnify whatever was being worshipped.

The granite falcon statues that flank the entrance are reproductions of ferocity — their size, their stillness, the directness of their stare — that I found unexpectedly affecting. The Egyptians understood intimidation as a design principle and applied it with the same precision they brought to everything else.

The town of Edfu itself is unremarkable in the way of all market towns — dusty, functional, full of life in the evening when the heat breaks and the streets fill with children and vegetable sellers and men walking slowly going nowhere in particular. I ate dinner at a place with no English menu, pointed at what the table next to me was eating, and received a dish of slow-cooked lamb with chickpeas that was magnificent and cost almost nothing.

When to go: The temple is open year-round, but Edfu itself bakes in summer. Come between October and March. If you are doing a felucca trip from Aswan north toward Luxor, plan Edfu as a half-day stop — the temple takes two hours to do properly, and the town deserves at least a meal.