There are few places on Earth where the ancient world feels quite so close to the modern one. In Cairo, a sprawling metropolis that seems determined never to sleep, the past rises above the traffic and restless energy of a city that has been reinventing itself for thousands of years.
But it is after dark, beneath the Egyptian sky, that Cairo reveals a different, more youthful personality. I arrived here expecting history. What I found was a city increasingly interested in its future.
At Giza, the Pyramids emerge from the darkness like something imagined rather than built. For nearly 5,000 years they have watched civilisations come and go. Tonight, however, the soundtrack is rather different. Beams of light sweep across the desert, bass reverberates through the night air, and thousands of revellers gather beneath the silhouettes of the ancient monuments.
I’m at Starlight Festival, a two-day electronic music festival in collaboration between EXIT and P+US, staged on a site overlooking the Pyramids, and the crowd is almost as striking as the setting.
Adriatique, Pete Tong, Michael Bibi and Charlotte de Witte,
