One academic used to say that if one heard at a bus stop someone murmuring: "thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,"[*] discussion of classic literature would be evident. But to hear, "It was like saying goodbye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain," could mean any vernacular anecdote, although actually the last words of Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms, an outstanding modern novel.

The mixture of classic and everyday values looms intensely in Egypt, an ancient land ambitious to be modern. Luxor seems a casual, familiar, overgrown village, yet overshadowed by huge legendary monuments as if invaded by other planets.

Abdul greeted me as I sketched felucca sailing boats on the Nile. I was no artist but my camera had broken in Cairo and I enjoyed tracing views with a pencil. But I had drawn his house, he exclaimed, there, on the far bank. I hoped this was no intrusion on Muslim custom, but he seemed pleased. He would guide me over there, to the Valleys of the Kings and Queens. Was I married? No, well, there was a marriage in his village tonight and he would invite me, he promised, as the ferry docked.

After the tombs and palaces, we reached his house at dusk and a youngish woman cooked on the open fire in the yard, his sister. We sat on stones to drink mint tea. He had been married but his wife moved away with her tribe. I could tell he was not easy to get on with. His sister also had been married but her husband was killed in a tribal war. Their mother had died just months ago, their father long since. He spilt mint tea on the cold stone in the firelight glow and crouched forward sobbing, hot tears glistening on his face. Life was hard, I agreed. Now nobody here was married. So where was the wedding supposed to happen tonight? In the Indian film, The World of Apu, a stranger comes by chance on a country wedding and ends up replacing the missing bridegroom. Could the same scenario be planned here? Abdul slunk off sullenly. His sister's eyes flashed in the firelight.

Nervously I mentioned the wedding and she said it was off. Why? Maybe the dowry was wrong, or something else. Weddings were not easy. Abdul returned scowling that the wedding was cancelled. His sister shrugged and said everyone knew that. She served the food, very simple, all that most people get around here. I thanked her on leaving and touched her hand. Her strong smile showed understanding through all the trouble that she bore better than Abdul could.

At the night ferry, he jumped aboard after me demanding more money for his guide services that had not been good. I refused and he sprang onto the rail of the upper deck to leap off if I did not comply. Then he disappeared into the eternal blackness of the Nile where I saw nothing. What would happen now?

A hooded figure approached me, dark and stealthy as death itself. He said not to worry, Abdul was on the deck underneath. It was an old trick of his kind. But I was from England, the North, he knew that. His wife was Scottish. Was I not married? I said I stayed late on the far bank for a wedding party but it never happened. Did I like weddings? He would show me a good one, not like that in the village. He owned a hotel. His car waited at the jetty. He had an English lady guest, never married, very famous. I would meet her.

He was called Hassan, his car and hotel would seem shabby in London but made him big in Luxor. The lady loomed at the top of his staircase. Hope Gleams fixed me with small blue eyes in a pale, boney face. "He is not married but he is off to a wedding tonight", the owner explained. "You are looking for a wedding, but you are afraid of not finding the right one", she announced. Why was I here? The monuments, tombs and temples, I mentioned. Had I seen the temple of Hatshepsut, 'the only queen monarch,' Hope Gleams said proudly as if it were herself. Only six months ago, terrorists there gunned down many white tourists. But before then the triennial event of Verdi's Aida had been performed in the magnificent appropriate setting. Vast properties had to be shipped over the Nile in barges, a spectacle in itself. Had I missed it all? Would I be back for the next one? The opera or the massacre, did she mean, I wondered.

We left for the wedding without her. It was no place for a woman of any description. None were in evidence, not even the bride. Nor did I meet the groom, a good friend of Hassan, somewhere around, they said.

Men danced to entrancing music, not with each other but each alone in an imaginary narcissistic spotlight. No drink but reefers were passed around and a few drags got me into the mood.

These weddings last five nights with the ceremony at the end. Suppose after all the feasting the couple changed their minds. They could not. Would they be killed? I asked. No, Egypt was a civilized country, they just could not, Hassan insisted. I was an odd person thinking like that, but I was liked here and should stay—or return soon.

Hassan had wed a Scots journalist, not like this but in an odd chapel in Cairo over a bottle of whisky. That sounded more like Hemingway, whose hero had said, "It was like saying goodbye to a statue"—similar to a classic Grecian urn, pure as an unravished bride.

Hope Gleams on the dusty staircase had seemed a statue, monumental as her beloved Aida, as her model Queen Hatshepsut, unique through time, a ghostly presence on her palace steps months ago when white bodies bled to death in a hail of bullets. Brutal carnage presses close around here as classic history, but I was not glad to be soon going back to the West where something is overlooked that they still have here: a touch of eternity.