Egypt Spiritual Retreat: Fourteen Days of Sacred Sites

You are on the plateau early, while the light is flat and the coaches are still in the city. The three pyramids are taken in turn and the change in engineering across them is the thing to watch for. The Grand Gallery inside the Great Pyramid is the reason to go in, and the low steep passage to reach it is the reason some people do not. The Sphinx follows along the causeway, at the level it was carved to be seen from. The afternoon stays free.

The Serapeum is an underground gallery cut into the rock at Saqqara to hold the burials of the Apis bulls. What is down there is a corridor lined with granite sarcophagi, each one carved from a single block and each one large enough to stand in. How they were brought down and positioned in a tunnel this size is a question nobody has a complete answer to, and standing beside one makes the question feel much more pressing than reading about it does. Djoser's Step Pyramid is above ground and predates everything at Giza. The afternoon returns you to Giza, because tomorrow is a very long drive.

Today is a road day and nothing else. Siwa is roughly ten hours from Cairo by car and there is no civil airport, so this is the only way in. The route runs up to the coast at Marsa Matruh and then turns south into the desert, and the second half is emptier than the first. There are stops for food and for standing up, and because the car is yours they happen when you want them. You arrive in the evening, tired, and see nothing today. It is said plainly here because a day like this is what Siwa costs, and it is better known before you book than after.

The Temple of the Oracle stands on the rock at Aghurmi, above the palm groves, and the climb up to it is short and steep. Alexander came here in 331 BC to consult it and left without recording what he was told, which is most of the reason the place is still famous. The ruins themselves are modest, and the position rather than the architecture is what holds people. The oracle at Siwa was known across the Greek world long before that, which is remarkable for somewhere this far from anything. The rest of the day is spent in the groves below, which are cooler than the town.

Shali is the old town, built from salt and mud on a rock in the middle of the oasis, and it partly dissolved when the rain came hard enough. Seeing a dissolved building still standing is a strange hour, and the streets that survive are narrow enough to be dark at midday. The spring at the edge of the town, stone lined and fed from below, is where the day ends, and swimming in it is an ordinary thing here rather than an arrangement anyone has to make. The salt lakes further out are the colour they are because of what is dissolved in them. This is the last day before the road back.

The same ten hours, in reverse. You leave early so the long middle stretch is behind you before the afternoon. Lunch is on the coast at Marsa Matruh, and after that the road fills as you come back down into the delta. You check in at the Four Seasons in Cairo and the evening is deliberately empty, because tomorrow starts with a flight south.

A morning flight puts you in Luxor and you drive north to Dendera the same day. The temple of Hathor is among the most complete in Egypt, and the reason to come is overhead: a ceiling cleaned of centuries of soot, with the blues and golds underneath close to what was first painted there. The zodiac on the ceiling of one of the roof chapels is a replica, and the original is in Paris, which is worth knowing before you look for it. There is a crypt below reached by a narrow stair, carved on every surface. Few coaches come this far north, so the hall is usually quiet.

Abydos is about three hours north of Luxor, and the temple Seti I built there holds the finest raised relief carving in Egypt, with pigment surviving in places. The king list cut into one wall names his predecessors in order, with the ones he preferred to forget left off. Behind the temple is the Osireion, a structure of enormous granite blocks sunk below the water table and reached down a passage, built to a heavier and plainer style than the temple in front of it. Its date has been argued over for a century, and standing in it you can see why the argument started. Abydos was the cult centre of Osiris, which is what makes this the anchor of a sacred sites route rather than one stop among many.

Karnak is roughly two thousand years of building on one site, and no single reign accounts for it. Reach the hypostyle hall early, because the scale stops registering once it fills. The sacred lake, the Sekhmet statues in the Ptah precinct and the Ptolemaic gate behind it take another hour and most visitors see none of them. Luxor Temple is lit after dark, with the cleared avenue of sphinxes running north out of it, and after ten days it is reasonable to take the evening off instead.

Medinet Habu is the mortuary temple of Ramesses III and the least visited of the large west bank sites, which stops making sense the moment you are inside it. Colour survives in the shaded parts of the ceiling, and the sunk relief is cut deep enough to hold shadow at any hour. The outer walls carry the record of a war against the Sea Peoples, with the dead counted in severed hands, which is not a figure of speech. The Valley of the Kings follows in the afternoon, with the tombs chosen by what is open and least crowded. It is a long day and the last one on this side of the river.

You move south to Aswan and reach Philae by boat, which is the only way onto the island. Isis was worshipped here after the rest of Egypt had turned Christian, and the last hieroglyphic inscription known anywhere was cut on this island. Crosses were later carved over parts of the earlier work, and both are still there on the same walls. The temple was cut into blocks and moved when the High Dam raised the lake over the island it was built on. You are staying at the Old Cataract, above the river.

You leave Aswan in the dark, because Abu Simbel is a long way south and the temples are best before the middle of the day. Ramesses cut them into a cliff to be seen by anyone coming north into Egypt, so the four seated figures are as much a border marker as a temple front. Twice a year the sun reaches the length of the inner sanctuary and lights three of the four statues at the back, and the one left in shadow is Ptah, a god of the underworld. The whole site was cut into blocks and lifted above the waterline in the nineteen sixties, and the join lines are visible once you know to look. The smaller temple for Nefertari is the one people underestimate. You are back in Aswan by the afternoon.

You fly back to Cairo in the morning, and the last day is built around your departure rather than a check out time. If there is room, the Museum of Egyptian Civilisation and its royal mummies is the right final hour. The transfer runs to the terminal with the same assistance through check in that you had two weeks ago. Fourteen days took you from the Serapeum to the oracle at Siwa to the Osireion at Abydos and on to Abu Simbel, which is a coherent route rather than a long one.