Being dumped off in Siwa is not like being dumped off anyplace else in Egypt. Anyplace else sees the local touts pressing you for a hotel room or taxi ride, or flashing several dozen watches, wallets, postcards, shrink-wrapped galabayas and veils that jangle with coins made in Taiwan, plus furnace-blasted miniatures of all things Egyptian: King Tut's bust, a pyramid, dung-beetles. But Siwa's locals don't even give you a passing glance.

After we said goodbye to our companions and cased the village square, which consisted of a couple of coffee houses, three restaurants, a shabby hotel and the marketplace itself, we stood staring into the dense palm forest lilting crazily around us, wondering where the water hole was and realizing this was not what we had imagined. We must have looked a bit lost because a blond-haired man bursting with a vitality that only three months in an alcohol-free desert climate with few western amenities could produce, pedaled toward us and hopped off his rickety bicycle.

"Can I help you?" he asked in a heavy northern European accent. This was Jens. He wore loose tan khakis, a white button-down shirt and had tied a red bandanna around his neck. This sportive dress seemed the order of the day for the foreigners. I asked him where he got the bike and he said a friend had loaned it to him. Everything in Siwa was either given or of nominal fare (such as a $5 hotel room and a $1 meal). Jens glowed with an energy and clear bright blue eyes that attested to this spa-like environment. Like any American, I was deeply envious of his apparent fantastic health and his ability to get something for free.

We wandered the village square. Mohammed's, a lowslung building with tin tables and tea glasses, was nearing its sleepy afternoon hour. We passed a pharmacy, a small souk, the melted village of Shali, and in five minutes were back at Mohammed's. We wandered further.

In front of the Cleopatra Hotel, a woman in a white wide brimmed hat and tan safari outfit dived into a Mercedes jeep and was spirited away. It just had to be the famous archeologist, Tuesday said, who was looking for Alexander's tomb.

As I watched her jeep zip off I couldn't help but be stirred just a little. The obsession in its own way was not so different from the other ones nudged along in this desert paradise. For example, at the Palm Tree Hotel, a lush little spot near the center of town, you could find people drying out, people painting masterpieces and people writing books: books about Siwa, books about the Berbers, books about their analysts and books about Martians. Out back was a veritable aviary where the ex-pats lounged under strategically located date palms, and cane chairs and tables were laden with backgammon boards, ash trays and Siwa water bottles, hiking boots and day packs, several interesting books (HEAVY books like Remembrance of Things Past, Under the Volcano, anything by Nietzsche). In the entrance were notices of trips 'into the desert' and out to a lake or a hot spring. Tourists (mostly aging Germans) were stuffed into Mercedes jeeps and roared out to some vacant natural hot tub where they could lie under the eaves of a lean-to, gorge themselves on chicken and pretend to be young Lawrences of Arabia for a day while the local gamins waited on them hand and foot for a pittance and were either not noticed at all, or if they were lucky then smugly tolerated.

Eventually we found a spare room, complete with dangling bare light bulb, open windows, no towels and tick mattresses. In the evening, we looked over the carpet of trees at sunset, listened to the donkeys braying, the dogs barking and the muzzein calling prayers, climbed under some mosquito netting and fell asleep.

The next afternoon walking near the marketplace, I was minding my own business when a woman came toward me from the mud-brick homes. This must be one of the Berbers, I thought. I had seen the occasional western female rush into a local shop to buy cigarettes or bottled water, but this was not a foreigner. She had a stately walk with great formal posture as if up the wedding aisle, and was covered in black from head to toe. It was a complete obliteration of the woman I'd seen in Middle East airports like Dubai where Saudi men (looking as dapper and sharp-edged as any Mafioso) led their harem along and - if you were lucky - you'd catch a glimpse of the stiletto heals or the toe of a pair of Guccis but nothing more.

Tuesday had told me about these woman. Girls married at 14 and covered in extravagant jewelry, they have little or no outside communication and because it is the duty of the men to shop it is extremely rare to see one out and about. The esteemed anthropologist Fakhry says these women cover their faces with their milayah, which Tuesday took to be some sort of veil. She may have led me to believe there were some mysteries about all of this, but she had not told me how to behave around them.

At first I did not want to look at her. It would be rude I thought, and I hoped she'd veer off. Of course I could veer off myself but there was no real place to veer to and if I did veer it would look obvious and thus I'd behave as if she were there when in fact I felt she wanted me to behave as if she were not there, or as if I were not there, or something. I did not want to act gauche, silly or stupid, but it occurred to me with sudden alarm that I would most likely display all three American values and permanently infect her world with western poison. On the other hand, it seemed mighty arrogant to think she'd notice of me at all. How many Egyptians had told me westerners were invisible to them? Still, I panicked and, at the last moment, I looked at her covered face believing that it would be inappropriate to cut her - all the time wondering how I was going to explain these feelings to Tuesday. Nothing can make you more self-conscious than confronting a fully clothed Berber female, and being in a position where you're practically going to rub shoulders in passing.

And then, with no more than five steps between us she lifted her hand to the bridge of her nose, pulled her milayah aside to show one eye, and a carnal jolt passed through me such as I'd never experienced. But what lingered soon transformed from an earthly sensuousness, to the riveting shock of sexual knowledge, to a transcendent union of humanity. Sounds pretentious in hindsight, but take it from me - whatever it was, it was deep.