Egypt Magic [1567]
Watch The Egyptian ship that inspired the famous British novelist Agatha Christie.
The steamship “BS Sudan” sailing along the Nile River near the city of Aswan inspired the famous British novelist “Agatha Christie” and wrote from the top during a journey for the novel “Death Over the Nile” in 1937.
Ben Affleck is the director and protagonist of Agatha Christie’s “Witness Evidence.”
The ship was built for the Egyptian royal family in 1885 before being converted into a cruise ship in 1921. Agata Christie, who has written 66 novels, and her husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, landed on the ship in 1933.
Amir Attia, the ship’s manager, notes that Agata Christie’s “flight atmosphere” on the ship served as an inspiration for her in writing the first chapters of her novel “Death on the Nile”, published in 1937.
The novel is still alive, as it has been adapted again in a cinematic work signed by British director Kenneth Branagh, expected to be shown in 2021.
Attia says that Christie, like members of the Western elite at the time, was a frequent traveller. With her husband, she received an invitation “to stay at the Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor, and then they made a Nile cruise for a few days onboard the Sudan ship before concluding her tour at the Old Cataract Hotel” in Aswan.
After its long neglect, the ship lives a renewed youth since its purchase and renewal by a French cruise company in the first decade of this century. The steamboat’s engine no longer uses coal as fuel, “but rather diesel and solar energy,” according to Attia.
From the wooden bridge, visitors can still enjoy seeing the palms on the sandy banks of the Nile, just like the Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot, one of the most prominent characters in Agata Christie’s novels.
Of the 23 rooms and suites on the ship, Attia asserts that the suite where Agatha Christi disembarked is the most desirable one for visitors to the ship, which employs 67 employees “day and night”. “Usually, there will be reservation requests for the next two years,” he adds.