The passengers had assembled in the lobby. I joined the fringes of the group – which, I was sorry to see, included the Tregarths. Avoiding them, I found myself standing next to Suzi Umphenour. She hailed me like an old friend, and I studied her in consternation. She had ignored the guidelines about dress, and was attired in a jumpsuit that clung lovingly to her posterior and bared her arms, shoulders, and cleavage.

‘Don’t you have a jacket?’ I asked.

‘It’s on the chair.’ She gestured carelessly. ‘But I don’t see why – ’

‘You’ll get a horrible sunburn. If nothing worse.’

‘Feisal said if I didn’t wear it somebody would drag me off behind a pyramid and rape me,’ Suzi said hopefully. ‘He’s such a bully.’

Feisal overheard, as she had meant him to. Frowning masterfully, he handed Suzi her jacket and hat, and ushered us down the gangplank.

‘Let’s sit together,’ Suzi said. ‘And have some girl talk. I adore men, but sometimes it’s a terrible bore having them cluster around.’

‘I seldom have that problem.’

‘Oh, now, honey, you’re just being modest. You know, if you’d spruce yourself up a little bit, you’d be real attractive.’

We took our places on the bus. By the time we reached the site my ears were ringing. Suzi had made helpful suggestions about my hair – ‘those little picks you have stuck in your bun are right cute, but you ought to let your hair hang loose instead of pulling it back’ – my makeup – ‘you ought to wear eyeliner, honey, and a darker-colour lipstick’ – and every article of clothing I had on. She had also analyzed, with devastating accuracy, every man on the boat. Feisal was the sexiest, but that Tregarth man had a certain something; a pity he was newly married.

I was determined to dump Suzi at the earliest possible moment but first I made her put on her jacket – a billowing big shirt of gauze so fine it did very little to fend off possible rapists – and her hat, a broad-brimmed straw that tied under her chin with a huge bow à la, I suppose she thought, Scarlett O’Hara. Then I fled. We had been told to stick with the group, but I figured that didn’t apply to me, and by that time I didn’t give a damn if it did. I don’t like listening to lectures, I’d rather wander in happy ignorance.

Taking my guidebook from my bag, I headed towards a corner of the enclosure, where massive walls of pale limestone towered high above my head. Solitude was impossible to attain; there were a dozen different tour groups present, clustered around their guides like flies on spilled sugar. I fended off a few importunate vendors of souvenirs and services and found a relatively quiet spot and a rock on which to sit.

It was still early; shadows lay cool and grey across the pale sand. The sky was a brilliant blue. Rising up against it, soft gold in the sunlight, was the Step Pyramid – the earliest example of monumental stone architecture, over four thousand years old. Worn and weathered, simple to the point of crudeness, it had more than sheer age to stir the imagination; there was something right about it, the slope and the proportions and, above all, the setting. One of my beloved medieval cathedrals would have dwindled in that immensity of sky and sand. This was a dream trip all right, a trip I had hoped to take one day. But I’d have traded the luxurious suite and the fancy food for an ordinary tourist excursion. How could I concentrate on pyramids and tomb paintings when my stomach was churning and my nerves were twanging like Grandad’s guitar strings? My eyes kept wandering from the carved lotus columns of the Southern Colonnade to the people gathered around Feisal.