The Nile River

Egypt is a river with a country attached to it. Almost the entire population lives on a strip of green a few kilometres wide either side of the Nile, and everything beyond that strip is desert.

For visitors, the practical version of this is simple: the stretch between Luxor and Aswan is the most rewarding way to move through Egypt, because the temples were built on the bank and the river is still the road.

You see the country rather than the highway. From the water the flood plain is unbroken: cane fields, buffalo, mud-brick villages, mango and date palms, children on the bank, and then, without transition, the desert cliff. From a coach you see none of it.

The temples between Luxor and Aswan — Esna, Edfu, Kom Ombo — were built as river stops. Arriving at them the way they were meant to be arrived at is not a gimmick; it changes how the buildings read.

And it solves the hardest problem in an Egyptian itinerary, which is the distance between Luxor and Aswan. Instead of losing a day to a road transfer, the transfer is the holiday.

For most of recorded history the Nile flooded every summer, depositing silt across the flood plain. The height of that flood determined whether Egypt ate. The entire administrative apparatus of ancient Egypt — surveying, taxation, the calendar — was organised around measuring and predicting it.

Measuring that flood was a formal business. Nilometers — stairways cut down to river level, graduated in cubits — survive at Elephantine Island in Aswan and at Edfu and Kom Ombo. The best preserved is on Roda Island in Cairo, built in AD 861 under the caliph al-Mutawakkil, and its reading set the year's tax.

The flood ended in 1970 with the completion of the Aswan High Dam. The switch away from a single silt-fed harvest had begun long before that: perennial irrigation spread across the Delta and Middle Egypt over the previous century, from the Delta Barrages begun in the 1840s to the Aswan Low Dam of 1902 and its two heightenings. What the High Dam did was finish the job in Upper Egypt, where basin irrigation and its one annual crop had survived — and with it the ancient rhythm of the country stopped.

The dam also drowned Nubia. A UNESCO campaign launched in 1960 moved the monuments in its way: Abu Simbel was cut into more than a thousand blocks between 1964 and 1968 and rebuilt about 65 metres higher, and Philae was re-erected on the neighbouring island of Agilkia by 1980.

The river was also the highway. Sailing upstream on the prevailing north wind and drifting downstream on the current, boats moved people, grain, stone and armies. The hieroglyph for travelling south is a boat with a sail up; for travelling north, a boat with the sail down.

• The Luxor to Aswan stretch, with Esna, Edfu and Kom Ombo along it
• The Esna lock, where cruise boats are raised or lowered between levels
• The first cataract at Aswan — granite islands and fast water
• Feluccas under sail — the lateen rig that has worked this river for generations
• The sharp line where irrigated green stops and desert begins
• Qubbet el-Hawa, the governors' rock-cut tombs in the cliff above Aswan
• Kitchener's Island and its botanical garden, reached only by boat