地    点： Luxor, Egypt
时    间： 1998
摄影师： Richard T. Nowitz

A tourist boat silhouetted against the setting sun ferries its passengers down the Nile.

The thin green corridor of the Nile Valley is a mere 7.5 percent of Egypt's land. The contrasting green and umber of the Egyptian landscape forms a sharp line between fertile earth and parched desert. "The gift of the Nile-that? what the ancients called this country," said a local man.

(Text adapted from and photograph shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Into an Antique Land," March 1999, National Geographic Traveler magazine)