From the novel The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif:

"And yet - I sit here in my room at the Shepheard's Hotel possessed by the strangest feeling that still I am not in Egypt. I have sat on the Pyramid plateau and my eyes have wandered from the lucid blue of the sky through the blanched yellow of the desert to the dark, promising green of the fields. I have marvelled at the lines between blue and yellow and then again between yellow and green - lines drawn as though by design. I have climbed the Pyramids and danced at the Khedive's Ball. I have visited the Bazaar and the Churches and the Mosques and witnessed the procession of the Religious Orders and played croquet at the Club at Ghezirah. I know a few words of the language and I can mark many streets by the houses of people with whom I am now acquainted, but there is something at the heart of it all which eludes me - something - an intimation of which I felt in the paintings, the conversations in England, and which, now that I am here, seems far, far from my grasp."