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This essay focuses on William Golding’s Egyptian Journal (1985), a travelogue commissioned by Faber and Faber at the time Golding’s fame had reached its acme. My contention is that Golding’s account deconstructs the author’s metaphysical tendencies and that this deconstruction takes the form of a puzzling dialogue between self and other. This leads me to challenge Edward Said’s claim that Orientalists, past and present, have always sought to pin down the imaginary with the context of imperial power. Using Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s concept of pragmatic “imposture” I argue on the contrary that the tourist and the Gournawi, the Orientalist and the Egyptian, are now produced by Golding’s text as two “alter egos.”