The Nile as a Hospitality Corridor

1 · POSITION

The Nile is the route and the hotel at once. Egypt’s settlements, temples and cities cluster along it because it made long-distance movement possible, and the traveller has always moved from one node to the next where food, boats, guides, markets and lodging could be found. The register holds the river as a corridor of hospitality in which, in the nineteenth century, the accommodation began to move with the guest. [1, 2]

2 · THE ROOM THAT TRAVELS

Under sail the room was the dahabiya: Amelia Edwards boarded the Philae in late 1873 with a captain, a steersman, twelve sailors, two cooks, two waiters and a dragoman, and was at Minya by Christmas. Under steam it became the cabin of Cook’s boats, which turned a fifty-day voyage to Aswan and back into twenty. [1, 3]

3 · THE ROOMS THAT STAY

At the river’s turning points the moving room met a fixed one. The Old Cataract at Aswan is recorded as built by Cook in 1899, the Winter Palace at Luxor opened in 1907. By the end of the twentieth century some 250 cruise boats crowded the river between Luxor and Aswan — the corridor had become an industry. [2]

4 · WHAT CHANGED THE RIVER

Two works changed it. The Suez Canal of 1869 put Egypt on the road east. The Aswan Dam, opened with its locks on 10 December 1902, removed the rapids that had stopped the boats, and let the river be sailed as one line. [1]

5 · ⚑ CANDOUR

⚑ This entry describes the corridor through the travel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the ancient river traffic it rests on is not described from sources here. The figure of 250 cruise boats is a travel writer’s, not a registry count. [1–3]