Saturday Trivia

The book: "The Cairo Diary" by Maxim Chattam, translated from the French by Susan Dyson (352 pages, St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95), in which a puzzle from the past intersects with the perils of the present.
The settings: Cairo, Egypt, 1928; Mont-Saint-Michel, France, 2005.
The sleuths: In Cairo, Inspector Jeremy Matheson of the British Colonial police. In Mont-Saint-Michel, Marion (we never learn her last name), a secretary in the Paris morgue.
The plot: In Cairo, several young children have been tortured, mutilated and killed, and Matheson takes over the case. In France, Marion has been secreted in a remote monastery by the French secret service after her revelations lead to a huge political scandal and her life is threatened. While helping one of the monks sort through books at a nearby library, Marion stumbles across Matheson's diary and finds herself drawn into the old mystery.

On several recent occasions, Pharaonic Queen Nefertiti has been at the centre of controversy. The latest exciting news involves the shooting of a US$130 million movie about her. It will be produced by American John Heyman and shooting is expected to start in Egypt in February."Nothing is really fixed. When Heyman was here a couple of months ago, he said that shooting would be in early 2008 and he's still raising money for the project."Some parts of the film will be shot in Morocco, and it's not settled yet whether they'll start in Egypt and then go to Morocco or vice versa," Youssef Sherif Rizqallah, the complex's head of international cooperation and an Egyptian critic, told the Mail.The US$130 million Nefertiti is based on the controversial bestselling Moses and Akhenaton, written by the Egyptian-born London-based writer Ahmed Osman. "It is not exactly based upon it. The film takes some of the main points from Osman's story, but the details are different," explained Rizqallah.Osman's tale is controversial, as historians say that it doesn't relate the real, historical story of Akhenaton and his wife Nefertiti. . . .

Two other films will also be shot in Egypt's Media Production City (EMPC): one tells the story of Cleopatra and the other is a thriller. In November, EMPC will produce Young Cleopatra with a budget of US$5 million."The production company, Young Legends, have been scouting shooting sites. They'll arrive in September to prepare for shooting after Ramadan," said Rizqallah, adding that the censors have already given the green light for the movie, while the producer has decided to change a few things to suit the shooting sites.The third film, The Exodus Scrolls, is a thriller that tells the story of the chase to find a stolen papyrus.

The pharaohs may have set the standard, but German entrepreneurs are hoping to challenge Egypt's pre-eminence in monumental self-indulgence by building the world's largest pyramid.

They have secured €90,000 (£61,000) in state funding to assess the feasibility of building a 1,600ft tall "Great Pyramid" near the town of Dessau, in the impoverished east German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Like the original Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt, this would be a place of burial. But instead of one ruler and his hangers-on, it would come to house the remains of millions of people.

The improbable plan is based on the belief that people will pay to have their ashes encased in the concrete blocks used to construct the monument. Millions of people would have to sign up to make it viable, though if the team behind it is successful, its members will be rich beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ambitious pharaoh.