Since I have decided to slip into Papa’s thoughts, retrace his footsteps, I think it’s only right that I should live it up here too. We’ll see what happens. I don’t have much money, but Egypt is dirt poor and, in the souk, the few dollars I do have will buy me a lot of the insipid pleasures tourists crave. I went back to the tour group and – whipped into a whirl of excitement and enthusiasm by our guide – we sped through Cairo by day and Cairo by night, raced through the museum, ignored local customs, raided the souks, pissed in the Nile, strolled the great boulevards, sat chattering noisily at a table outside one of the mythic cafés that once made Cairo famous, back in the days of Egyptian cinema, of great divas and fabulous international archaeological expeditions. The lustre had faded somewhat, but we made the best of it, we embraced poverty though we were only slumming it, drank syrupy mint tea rather than champagne, took ramshackle buses rather than barouches and limousines, walked in the sweltering sun rather than in the shade of parasols, and prattled endlessly about the Cyclopean mysteries of the pharaohs. Then we headed for Giza where, like every other tourist, I decided I’d like to have my photo taken next to the Great Pyramid. But the photograph I wanted had to be special, I wanted to be surrounded by a bevy of elderly English ladies. I looked around and found a group of plump, rosy-cheeked English women, their arms bare, and among them – miracle of miracles – one who was lean and angular as flint, wrapped in a prickly shawl, a dead ringer for the formidable Victoria. Now all I needed was to secure their cooperation. The old dears were only too happy to oblige. I borrowed a pith helmet from a Dutch tourist, hired one of the professional photographers, positioned the ladies as in the original picture, gave them a sidelong smile and shouted, ‘Maestro! Do your worst!’ Five minutes later I had a print, a perfect copy of the original – if you ignore the fact that I looked gaunt as a camp prisoner. On the back of the photograph, I wrote: ‘Helmut Schiller, son of Hans Schiller, Giza, 11 April 1996.’ Half a century separates the two photographs; that, and a few million dead gone up in smoke.