In Luxor, Ancient Egypt feels newly alive

The water is cold – and clear. Half-hidden amid the palm-tufted grounds of the Temple of Seti I, this tiny, sacred, sunken lake on Luxor’s West Bank was once the domain of Ancient Egyptian priests.

More than 3,000 years later, women from nearby villages still come, hoping its waters will serve as a fertility aid or a balm for their sick children, my guide Ahmed Hassan, who was born and raised on this side of the Nile, tells me. It’s one of the area’s many miracles, he adds: no one knows where the water comes from, but it hasn’t run dry since those priests of antiquity first bathed here. Hedging my bets, I submerge my hands.

It can be difficult to know what to believe in this transcendent stretch of Upper Egypt, more than 600 kilometres south of Cairo, where the Nile – a humbling, ever-writhing thing – exudes a life force of its own; the mountains cradle secret treasures; and the light, particularly at golden hour, plays tricks, almost convincing you that you have travelled back in time. The gap between the real and the mystical feels flimsy, whether you are considering the scale of the approximately 1,000-tonne, 20-metre-tall colossus of Ramses II, inexplicably carved from a single piece of granite and currently lying prostrate at the king’s statuesque funerary temple, the Ramesseum; or the unnerving precision and intensity of the hieroglyphs in the tomb of Ramses V and VI in the Valley of the Kings, rendered in an ancient palette of lapis lazuli, malachite, iron oxide and limestone that has proven immune to the ravages of time.