ABSTRACT
In 1877 the popular novelist Amelia B. Edwards published A Thousand Miles up the Nile, a travelogue describing her experiences in Egypt, and a work that marked the beginning of a love affair that would transform British Egyptology. Edwards describes her observations from her hotel window as a fairy-tale tableau, an exotic dream almost hallucinatory in its peculiar perfection. Made increasingly accessible with the rise of mass tourism, late nineteenth-century Egyptian hotels combined modern luxuriousness with a theatricality that recalled a glorified past, offering a dream-like experience for their clientele, which facilitated both the invention and realization of fantasies. While Egypt's hotels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries function in unique ways, this literary vein hints at a more extensive capacity for the supernatural within the deluxe boarding-house. The gas lighting is certainly more reminiscent of the entrance hall of Shepheard's than of an ancient Egyptian tomb.
