Cairo has one of the world's busiest airports, and as we walked into the terminal from the tarmac, we found a sea of people swarming a handful of immigration desks. Most visitors (including Americans) must have a visa and obtain it upon arrival, but before we could look for the end of the line, a representative from African Travel stepped forward.

 In a matter of minutes, Mido whisked us through immigration, introduced us to our guide for the entire week, an Egyptologist named Hany, collected our bags and walked us through customs.

Outside, our private shuttle was waiting along with our driver and an armed, plainclothes policeman, dressed in suit and tie. Hany explained that Egypt goes to tremendous lengths to ensure the safety of tourists. In addition to a high-profile police presence at tourist attractions and hotels, the government frequently assigns officers to accompany groups of tourists, at no charge.

 Cairo is a sprawling city of 17 million people, but after 10 minutes I wondered how so many had survived the traffic. At first I thought that drivers changed lanes with reckless abandon, but then I realized "lanes" don't really describe what happens out there. It's more of a free-for-all. Our driver was quite careful but more than once I braced for a sideswipe that never came.

 Most of the streets we passed were teeming with people, and the majority of men were dressed casually in slacks and shirts. There were a significant number dressed in the traditional ankle-length robes, or galabeya, and a much smaller number in business suits.

Almost all the women we saw wore colorful scarves over their heads, long-sleeve blouses and ankle-length skirts or slacks. Some wore black burqas, loose-fitting head-to-toe garments with a narrow slit--sometimes veiled--for the eyes.

 For a period of nearly 500 years, from the 16^th to 11^th century B.C., Egyptian Pharaohs were buried in the Valley of the Kings, in elaborate tombs dug out of solid rock. Some of their wives and children were buried in the nearby Valley of the Queens.

Pharaohs began working on their tombs as soon as they were crowned, as elaborate tributes to themselves and to the gods that would welcome them to the afterlife. The walls of these multi-room tombs were engraved with hieroglyphs and brightly painted.

When their bodies had been mummified, the rulers were sealed in their tombs along with treasure and various possessions that would be needed in the next world. Many of these tombs are amazingly well preserved and nine are lit and open to the public, including the most famous of them all, the tomb of Tutankhamun.

It is a smallish tomb, most likely because he died at a young age, before it was completed. Somehow tomb robbers lost track of it after some minor artifacts had been removed, and it was buried and forgotten for centuries. When it was finally unearthed in 1922, the tomb of Tutankhamun contained a wealth of artifacts including a solid gold funeral mask that is often used to symbolize the greatest treasures of Egyptian antiquity.

 We were losing speed, drifting lazily toward a lock in the Nile that would have to be cleared before continuing upstream. Suddenly, there was activity on both sides of the wide river as men dressed in ankle-length gowns (galabeya) ran to rowboats and paddled furiously out into the channel directly ahead of us.

I walked to the front of the observation deck for a better view of the eight to ten wooden boats that had scrambled into the water to intercept us. Each carried two to four men and they were closing fast on the middle of the channel. They were perhaps 100 yards away, and our riverboat was by that time almost dead in the water.

 Then we were in the middle of the chaos, boats to port and starboard sides with men standing and waving and yelling--in various strange languages. I ran to a side rail and leaned over to look down, drawing the attention of at least three of our visitors. Each had something in his hand, and as soon as they saw me they took aim and heaved their packages at my head.

"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh," they sailed by and plopped softly on the deck behind me. A fellow passenger picked one up to examine the contents, and to our amazement it was filled with...scarves!

These weren't pirates, or worse, they were boat-to-boat salesmen, taking "pushy" to a new level.

For the next 30 minutes, any passenger who came close enough to the rail to show so much as an eyelash to the boats four decks below was immediately targeted by bags filled with clothes--galabeya, headdresses, scarves and more.

A few passengers opened the bags and began negotiations with the senders, who seemed capable of speaking almost any language. Some of us dutifully attempted to toss the unopened bags back down to the proper boat.

 From time to time, we passed small villages, and we could see that the Nile is still the center of everyday life. Women covered from head to toe washed clothes in the river in the stifling heat, while children waded in for a swim. Long irrigation canals carried water to crops and fields with grazing water buffaloes.

For more specifics Call or