"We always have a pretty interesting crowd here," he tells me. "Especially in the 6-pound [$1.75] rooms on the third floor. Up there, you're never really sure why or how long people are going to stay. Just last week we had a transvestite from France: nice legs, a full collection of sequined miniskirts and a 5 o'clock shadow. He -- or she -- didn't last long. On the other hand, we have a Sudanese Christian up there who first checked in a year and a half ago. She tells people she's an opera singer."

"Why are you staying here?"

"Lots of reasons," Tom says, absently pulling at his beard with long fingers. "Right now I'm learning Arabic. Plus, I'm trying to pull some strings and get an Egyptian passport."

"Why would you want an Egyptian passport?"

Tom looks at me as if the answer should be obvious. "So I can go to Iraq," he says.

As the whiskey makes its way around the room, people start telling travel stories, all of them outrageous, most of them third hand: the Norwegian guys who sold a bottle of Chivas Regal for $1,000 in Saudi Arabia; the British teen who bought a camel in Darbw, Egypt, and supposedly rode it to the Sinai; the Japanese trekking group who lost their jungle guide to a land mine in Laos. Hassan, the Sultan's charismatic night clerk, puts some Arabic pop tapes into the boombox, and the Swiss kid unwraps his honey tobacco and primes some more sheesha coals on the kitchen stove.

As the lobby conversations reach a boozy crescendo, I wonder to myself whether Flaubert would have felt at home here. On one hand, the flophouse atmosphere -- $2.35 beds and bad plumbing -- combined with our middle-class goofiness might have caused the patrician French novelist to sniff with disdain. On the other hand, this far-flung international cast, with its freewheeling late-night discourse, harks back to social rituals that were much more common in Flaubert's day. Indeed, the scene here in the Sultan Hotel lobby is in its own way reminiscent less of commodified 21st century electronic culture than it is of ritualized 19th century parlor culture.

As the night wears on, Tom breaks out a few more choice bottles from his speakeasy stash. The conversation becomes less coherent, and our post-opera soiree dwindles down to a handful of sleepy-eyed stalwarts.

On the TV in the corner, an Egyptian man in a cardigan sweater and black horn-rimmed glasses sings a 10-minute love song to a corpulent woman in a headscarf.

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My second day in Cairo begins at 2 in the afternoon, which is when I wake up. Encouraged by the fact that it is far too late to try to see the pyramids, I wander down to the Sultan lobby in search of diversion. There I find the towering Tom, who tells me that he plans to lead an excursion to the Palmyra belly-dancing club later in the evening. Thrilled by the excursion's exotic implications, I tell him to count me in.

When Flaubert visited Egypt 150 years ago, he took particular interest in belly-dancing. In all likelihood, this had more to do with the fact that most dancers doubled as prostitutes than with the dancing itself. In Esna, Flaubert saw the performance of a dancer named Kuchuk Hanem, who performed "The Bee" -- a striptease reputedly so erotic that the musicians had to be blindfolded. Flaubert's descriptions of his extracurricular activities with Hanem ("Effect of her necklace between my teeth; her cunt like rolls of velvet as she made me come: I felt like a tiger") and various other Egyptian performers ("and there was another, on top of whom I enjoyed myself immensely, and who smelled of rancid butter") seem to underscore Europe's erotic obsession with "the Orient" at the time.

However, erotic stereotypes in Egypt long predate Flaubert -- as even Herodotus' description of the Nile Valley in the fifth century B.C. is full of sexual footnotes. When describing Egyptian customs, for instance, Herodotus noted a spring festival wherein women carried puppets with huge, hinged penises that were pulled up and down by strings. "There is some sort of religious significance to the size of the genitals," Herodotus noted dryly, "and the fact that they are the only part of the puppet's body which is made to move."

As it turns out, belly-dancing performances in Cairo don't start until after midnight, so I have a full evening to anticipate the sensual delights that await.

I ultimately discover, however, that anticipation doesn't always mesh with reality.

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