Kom Ombo greets the river head-on. Where most Egyptian temples sit back from the Nile, this one stands on a bend of the bank so close to the water that cruise boats moor almost at its feet, and the columns catch the late sun straight off the river. The setting is half the magic — sugarcane country stretching away behind, feluccas tacking past, and the temple glowing apricot at dusk. It is a small town with a single, strange and beautiful reason to stop, and the approach by water, with the sanctuary rising slowly into view, is one of the loveliest arrivals on the whole Nile.

What makes the temple extraordinary is its doubleness. It was built for two gods at once and split perfectly down the middle — twin entrances, twin halls, twin sanctuaries — the southern half for Sobek, the crocodile god, the northern for Haroeris, a form of the falcon Horus. Everything comes in pairs, mirrored with uncanny symmetry. On one wall, carved in stone, is a famous panel of surgical and medical instruments — forceps, scalpels, scales — among the earliest such images known. Next door, the small Crocodile Museum displays mummified crocodiles drawn from the temple's sacred precinct, leathery and unsettling.

Beyond the temple, the river itself is the pleasure. A felucca drifts you out onto the Nile where the light is best, the sail filling and falling slack. On the bank, look for the deep cylindrical Nilometer once used to gauge the annual flood. Time your visit well and you can detour to the camel market at nearby Daraw, one of the largest in Egypt, where animals driven up from Sudan change hands in a dusty, noisy, entirely unromantic spectacle — a reminder that this stretch of the Nile has been a trading crossroads for far longer than any temple has stood here.