I have walked into the Valley of the Kings more times than I can count, and I still feel the same thing every time: the air changes at the entrance to a tomb. It goes cool and dry and slightly mineral, like the inside of a stone jar. But the place I quietly hope people will let me take them is fifteen minutes south of there, and almost nobody asks for it by name. It is a small village of low stone walls, laid out on a slope of pale rubble. From the road it looks like the foundations of something that never got finished. My grandfather called it the place of the workers. Archaeologists call it Deir el-Medina. This is where the men who built the royal tombs lived. Not the pharaohs. The carvers, the plasterers, the draughtsmen, the scribes. The ones who did the work.

The first thing you should know about Philae is that you cannot walk to it. You get in a small boat at a jetty south of Aswan, and a man in a long white galabeya casts off without much ceremony, and for about ten minutes there is nothing to do but sit. Granite islands slide past, black and rounded, polished by water. The engine is loud. Nobody talks much. Then the boat comes around the last rock and the temple is simply there, sitting on the island with its feet in the river. I have made this crossing since I was a boy, and I still turn my head at the same moment.

I want to tell you about a doorway. It is in Gharb Soheil, on the west bank at Aswan, about halfway up the sandy lane that climbs from the water. The wall around it is whitewashed. The doorframe is painted a blue so saturated it looks wet, and above the door there are three plates set into the plaster, and a row of hand painted triangles in ochre and green running along the top of the wall. A woman I have known for years lives behind it. Her mother painted that frame. Her daughter repaints it now, the same colour, because that is the family's blue. I have taken hundreds of people past that door and I have never once got there without somebody stopping.