This is not a fear of existential belittlement in the presence of the ancient megaliths, nor do I fear some presumed Pharaonic curse. Rather, I fear letdown. I fear I won't see the grand old monuments with the proper degree of awe or historical perspective. I fear that in the process of comparing reputation with reality, I will be disappointed. I fear that the pyramids -- which have been perused, praised and plundered for thousands of years -- will prove, in experience, to be little more than a static tourist cartoon, devoid of genuine inspiration or beauty.

The most irritating part of this pyramid phobia is that I will ultimately be forced to confront it. After all, going to Cairo without seeing the pyramids is like a marriage without consummation: You can try it, but ultimately the obsession with what you're missing will get the best of you.

I can procrastinate, however -- and that's what I've resolved to do. Taking a taxi from the Cairo airport to Orabi Square at midday, I unsling my pack at a park bench, do a bit of reading and let the city soak in before I look for a place to stay.

My literary companion in Cairo is Gustave Flaubert, who, before penning "Madame Bovary," traveled to Egypt in 1850 and recorded his impressions in a series of letters to his friends. Like me, the 28-year-old Flaubert was indecisive in his opinion of the ancient Pharaonic ruins. At times, he regarded the old tombs and temples with humble awe, but at other times he expressed disappointment at the realities of his tourist itinerary. "The Egyptian temples bore me profoundly," he wrote home at one point. "Oh necessity! To do what you are supposed to do; to be always, according to the circumstances (and despite the aversion of the moment), what a young man, or a tourist, or an artist is supposed to be!"

In keeping with the age-old traveler's instinct to seek on the road what one enjoys at home, Flaubert eased his tourist angst in Egypt by frequenting the local whorehouses. Not only did this activity provide his journal with some memorable passages ("Coup with Little Sophie: She is very corrupt and writhing, extremely voluptuous -- I stain the divan"), but it also gave him the impetus to stray from his luxury hotels and riverboats into the seedier parts of town. Here, Flaubert found the depraved exoticism he'd hoped for. "There is one new element which I hadn't expected to see and which is tremendous here," he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving in Cairo. "And that is the grotesque. All the old comic business of the cudgeled slave, of the coarse trafficker in women, of the thieving merchant -- it's all very fresh here, very genuine and charming. In the streets, in the houses, on any and all occasions, there is a merry proliferation of beatings right and left."

Sitting on my bench, paging through Flaubert's memoirs, I take in the sights of Orabi Square. Around me, a brown smog hangs low over the buildings as Egyptians in jeans, dresses or djellaba robes crowd the sidewalks. Children wrestle with each other at curbside, and round-faced Berber women sell tissues on the corner. Colored pyramids of fruit stretch back into alleyways; purple slabs of meat swing in doorways. Teenage boys bicycle through the crowds with crates of bread balanced on their heads; old men wearing checkered kaffiyeh scarves stop to ask me where I'm from. Idle businessmen haunt the teahouses to smoke their sheesha water pipes and play dominoes. Out in the street, stalled taxis blast their horns uselessly.

From what I can see, Cairo is noisy, crowded, chaotic and friendly, but by no means grotesque in Flaubert's sense of the word. If first impressions mean anything, I would have to conclude that this city has tamed a bit in the past 150 years.

But then, I've only been here for an hour.

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