In addition to pioneering riverboat tourism on the Nile, Thomas Cook built two remarkable hotels on its banks around the turn of the 20th century: the Winter Palace in Luxor and the Cataract (now called the Old Cataract) in Aswan. Wealthy Europeans would escape the cold and spend weeks at a time there. As a 1911 travelogue about Egypt put it, “The soft air and golden light of the Egyptian winter make everything seem like a dream.”