"Cairo is beautiful at night. You can't see the dust," said Omar Sharif, the city's most famous resident, as we watched the sun sink over the Nile from his suite at the top of the Cairo Sheraton's tower.

He has a point. During the day the chaos of modern Cairo - its traffic, pollution, people and heat - is overwhelming. Yet at sunset, as the mosques call the faithful to prayer and the heat and dust vanish with the fading light, the city is transformed.Even the taxis stop tooting and the Nile, fast flowing and magnificent, glimmering with reflected light, dominates the metropolis.

A large cold drink or dinner on one of the many riverboats moored off Zamalek Island is the perfect way to appreciate the sunset transition from chaos to calm.

For the seasick, the Marriott Hotel has a riverside terrace which is almost as good. Drinks in this and other such places can be alcoholic - a bonus, as outside the big hotels, which act as oases of western culture in Cairo, booze is scarce in this Muslim country.

Tipples at this hour also come with a plentiful supply of delicious snacks. Forget dry roasted peanuts - nibbles in Cairo are a feast: sweet young cucumbers, radishes, carrots and apples from the Nile delta - especially good are Egyptian peas, peeled with the thumbnail and tasting like a cross between a salty chickpea and a broad bean.

After a cold beer - or if you want to go native, a mint tea - take a walk through the twilight streets. Even in quiet residential areas they are alive with smells and sights: wafts of baking bread; aromatic spices; burning charcoal; stalls piled high with rainbow fruit or gaudy flip flops; and the wailing of Arab music.

For a real assault on the refined western senses, head for the area to the north of the Midan Opera. Here the streets become an open market at night, spreading far into the old Islamic quarter and the famous Khan al-Khalili bazaar.

To plunge into the back alleys is a wild version of lucky dip. In one the pavement was awash with blood. Butchers chopped and hacked at the carcasses of mutilated beasts, extracting chunks and chucking them into huge colorful plastic buckets already overflowing with gore and offal. Cairo housewives argued with axe-wielding stall holders over the equivalent of a few pennies. The next revealed a modern Tin Pan Alley - stereos, phones, kettles, answering machines, lights and computers spilled out on to the thoroughfare in a riot of 21st-century gadgetry - somehow at odds with the medieval donkey carts tethered nearby.

Almost as incongruous were the clothes. Because of Islam, most Egyptian women wear a scarf over their hair and many sport long, all-covering outer robes in black or brown. Don't be deceived. If the clothes in the market are anything to go by, underneath there might be vibrant colored underwear in blue, red, purple, yellow, gold, flowers - and that's just the bras.

When wandering becomes too much, stop in a cafe; the hookah pipes with apple and honey tobacco cost around 30 cents. Tea and coffee are hot and sweet and even cheaper. (One word of warning: most cafes are for men only; women on their own tend to get hassled.)

When legs give out, rickety, rust-bucket taxis are the best way to get around if Omar isn't handy with a limousine. The Cairo traffic is not for the fainthearted; nor is the driving. It is a perennial James Bond car chase: take a Valium and always fix your price with the driver before getting in. Just four or five Egyptian pounds (around $1.50) seemed to get me anywhere in the city.

As the evening draws on, the options are limited. The big hotels have casinos which are open all night - popular with expatriates and rich Arabs - or there are nightclubs playing western hits or offering traditional belly dancing. The dancers are often western, as any kind of dancing is seen by Egyptians as a highly erotic and unchaste business.

Most nightclubs are slightly seedy: Jackie's at the Nile Hilton is popular late at night with European showgirls from the "discos" of the Giza strip on Pyramids Road. The Giza strip is full of drunken, lecherous locals.

The best option is to sit in cafes or over dinner (the Felfela restaurants have excellent fava beans with oil and tomatoes, tabouleh and tahina) until bedtime.

Even better is to sleep early and rise with the lark to see the pyramids at dawn. This is a particularly good plan because the midday heat can be fierce, even in winter. The Great Pyramids are a mere half-hour from the center of Cairo, in Giza. A guide is a good idea, both for information and to prevent harassment.

The three Great Pyramids really do live up to their name - huge, solid stone triangles looming out of the desert. The most incredible thing is the way the city turns to sand and suddenly the scene is straight out of "Lawrence of Arabia."

The largest pyramid, once belonging to King Cheops, is not open for entry or climbing (tourists erode it); however it is possible to enter the burial chambers beneath the Chephren Pyramid (the middle one). This is not a trip for the claustrophobic. The entrance is small and leads to a narrow (just about wide enough for two people), low (you have to crouch), steep (there is a slatted ladder) passageway extending down for about 100 feet (too far). The heat is stifling, the smell atrocious; there should be a large government health warning at the entrance. You also have to pay about $3 for the privilege, and there are no carvings or paintings.

A much better way to spend the money is on hiring a horse or camel. Riding through the sand on a loping camel towards the pyramids may be a cliche, but it's an experience not to be missed.

A similar must-do is the Egyptian Museum back in the center of Cairo. In fact, there's so much to see that it is hard for the uninitiated to know where to start.

My guide, Hussein, 28 and a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Minia, was invaluable. He pointed out the glass eyes of the statues which seemed to follow us around, the details on the hieroglyphics and paintings and household paraphernalia of the boy-king Tutankhamun. He also gave me a sense of the immense complexity and art of the civilization, how it had all been deciphered from the remnants, and how the key players such as Ramses II shaped their kingdoms and their afterlives.

I was so intrigued by his tour I went for another to the ancient city of Memphis's necropolis at Saqqara, home to the very first, or Step, Pyramid. Here in the tomb of the Fifth Dynasty Princess Idut there are magical colorful paintings of oxen, gazelles and ancient life - the fishermen of the Nile look just as they do today.

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Saqqara is still being excavated by archaeologists; it was only discovered in 1924 and is much less of a tourist trap than Giza. The 18-mile journey down the Nile valley and into the desert is worth doing in its own right; the raging sandstorm the day we went made it feel like the set of "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Back at base, the citadel with its alabaster mosque of Mohammed Ali, high on a hill with panoramic views over the rest of the city, is a good place to say au revoir to modern Cairo.

Looking out over the Nile, mosques and Coptic churches - even with Omar's dust and a desert sandstorm stinging your eyes - you will definitely want to come back.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

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