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Death on the Nile




Death on the Nile
Connie Willis

Connie Willis is the only writer ever to have won Nebula Awards in all four categories of fiction. She has in addition won
five Hugo Awards, including one for her novel Doomsday Book, which was also honored with the Nebula Award and the
Locus Award, and one for this story. Her other honors include the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for her first novel,
Lincoln’s Dreams. Impossible Things, a recent collection of her short fiction, and Uncharted Territory, a new novella,
display this compulsively readable writer at her best.

Of her Nebula Award nominee “Death on the Nile,” she writes:

“Stories of wonder often have their beginnings in noticing some magic everyone else has missed, in making some
connection no one else has seen, or in illuminating some ordinary thing with ), skill and style so that it seems
extraordinary. :

“I don’t claim any of that for ‘Death on the Nile.” It is, after .’; all, about Egypt, that place of’wonders more in number
than those \ of any other land,‘ as Herodotus said, and I never met anyone who wasn’t immediately drawn to (and troubled
by) its magic and mystery. Even Napoleon’s army, arriving at Luxor, ’at the site of its scattered ruins, halted of itself, and
by one spontaneous impulse, grounded its arms.‘ How could they not be awed by its wonders— its pyramids and sphinxes
and pharoahs? Its curses and treasures and kings?

“I can’t even claim credit for the connections. They are all right there in plain sight: the torchlit tombs and the tarry linen
bandages, the jackals and snakes and silence. And the stone steps, drifted with sand, leading down and down. And down.”




CHAPTER ONE:

PREPARING FOR YOUR TRIP — WHAT TO TAKE


“ ‘To the ancient Egyptians,’ ” Zoe reads, “ ‘Death was a separate country to the west—’ ” The plane
lurches. “ ‘—the west to which the deceased person journeyed.’ ”

We are on the plane to Egypt. The flight is so rough the flight attendants have strapped themselves into
the nearest empty seats, looking scared, and the rest of us have subsided into a nervous window-
watching silence. Except Zoe, across the aisle, who is reading aloud from a travel guide.

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 Death on the Nile



This one is Somebody or Other’s Egypt Made Easy. In the seat pocket in front of her are Fodor’s Cairo