It was that hour of the day when night arrives and the faithful are called to pray. It was also the time most people leave the desert around Giza and head back to the city. But I was still there, a little way into the sands, all of the Sahara behind me, watching the sun fade on the mountain of stone that is the Great Pyramid.
The pyramid plateau has been the setting for many crimes, both real and imagined. Murder, adultery, theft, even sorcery has been conjured or committed here. To paraphrase one long-time Egypt observer, one wonders whether people are interested in the antiquities or the iniquities of Egypt. Miss Christie, it seems, had a taste for the latter. I do not and the silence of the desert, the absence of other people and a sudden chill in the wind began to play on my mind. I hurried back to the crowds.
One hundred years ago — in 1910 — a 20-year-old Agatha Christie spent three months in Egypt as part of her 'coming out'. She stayed at the Gezira Palace Hotel in Cairo — now the Marriott. Her mother took her to the Egyptian Museum — then without any Tutankhamun treasures as the tomb wasn't discovered for another 12 years — and hoped that she would tempt her daughter south to Luxor. Agatha declined.
'The wonders of antiquity were the last thing I wanted to see,' she wrote in her autobiography. The presence of young British Army officers seems to have been more of a lure. So instead of temples and tombs, she watched polo at the Gezira Sporting Club, attended dances at the city's grand hotels, went to the edge of the desert for picnics and flirted not a little.
Yet Christie's experiences were not wasted. She was glad to have saved the antiquities until she was old enough to appreciate them — and found an unexpected passion when she married a British archaeologist. And she used the monuments in her stories. She introduced us to Jacqueline de Bellefort, the villain of Death on the Nile, beside the Great Pyramid. Down at the end of the causeway beneath the pyramid, in front of the Sphinx, was where Hercule Poirot made his entry, impeccably dressed and with a moustache waxed and curled like the King of Egypt's.
