The friendly net of the Aswan Shipping Company was waiting to catch me in Suez – luckily, because I stepped ashore into pitch darkness, where black shapes shouted rudely with onion-scented breath for my passport. There had been a power failure in the dockside part of the city.

A long delay followed in the coal-mine atmosphere of an unlit customs shed, but at last a courteous, trim-looking Egyptian drove up, introduced himself as Mohamed al-Hattab, the manager of the company in Suez, and loaded me, my baggage and his assistant into his car. ‘It’s the security people,’ he said, explaining the delay in the inky customs hall. ‘They’re looking for European terrorists. So many Arab countries are against us now that Sadat is trying to make peace with Israel, and they recruit Europeans to do their sabotage for them. They think Europeans won’t be suspected, so our people must be very vigilant.’

Out of the area of the power cut, we dropped off the young assistant with his bottles of Captain Visbecq’s eau de Cologne, and Mohamed al-Hattab drove me to the Bel Air Hotel in the centre of the city. I had stayed in this old hotel in 1968, when most of the buildings around it had been reduced to rubble by Israeli shellfire. I put my bags in a room at the top of marble stairs that had seen better days, and then we walked across the road to a second hotel called the Misr Palace, where it was evident from the welcome that the waiters and other clients gave him that Mr al-Hattab was a popular visitor. ‘This is a good place for company,’ he said. A table with a bottle of Red Label, a bowl of ice and a jug of water waited for him on a closed corner terrace.

From here we overlooked one of the city’s principal traffic intersections, and probably its most lively one. It was a bedlam of cars, trucks and donkey carts, and, because it was a level crossing as well, with much hooting, clanking and blowing of steam the passenger and goods trains on the main line from Cairo passed almost through the lobby.

‘First things first,’ said Mohamed al-Hattab, briskly hospitable, and poured me a whisky two fingers deep. Then, with a broad smile: ‘I’ve found a ship for you, sailing tomorrow afternoon for Aqaba and Jedda. A good captain, a friend of mine. Not a big ship, but not too small, taking pilgrims to Mecca and Egyptian workers to Jordan. No luxury, I must warn you. Called Al Wid.’

Luxury was not one of my worries, I assured him. I was delighted to be able to move on so soon. ‘Ahmed Bey asked me to help,’ he said. ‘And so you are welcome.’ Captain Rashad, Ahmed Bey Karawia, Mohamed al-Hattab: may Allah bless them.

Soon we were joined by a young captain from the Canal Company, and a few minutes later two large men with bullnecks rolled up and were introduced by Mohamed al-Hattab as marine contractors. They were enormously fat; their double chins quivered when they sat down.

When I told Mohamed al-Hattab I’d been here not long after the Six-Day War of 1967, he said, ‘Suez really suffered then. It had a population of a hundred and thirty thousand. After the bombardments destroyed so much of it, only about three or four thousand people stayed. I was one of them, but I had nothing to do. The place was empty, so there was no work. Suez was dead.’

‘You say Suez was dead,’ I said, ‘but I have a story for you. I came here on a brief visit from Cairo in 1968 with a friend, Nick Herbert of The Times of London. We had lunch in the Bel Air, the only place left standing. Just for fun we wrote a postcard to my foreign news editor in London and posted it in a postbox half buried in rubble. We thought it might be found a few years later when the war ended. But the card reached London before us, only ten days later. Some postman must have carried on through the shelling, like people in the London blitz. He deserved a medal.’

Now Suez was certainly alive again. Below us through the glass two elderly policemen in baggy white uniform with sergeant’s chevrons on their sleeves cursed the traffic and blew piercing, angry whistles without effect.

Mohamed al-Hattab and the contractors talked about the laziness of Egyptian youth (we could see groups of young Egyptians in tight trousers or ankle-length robes hanging listlessly about in the street below). ‘You can’t fire the slackers,’ one of the contractors complained. ‘It’s illegal. You can only dock their salary for a very few days.’ The other contractor agreed. ‘Only ten per cent of our people really work,’ he said. They shook their heads and chins disapprovingly over the whisky.

The young captain from the Canal Company said, ‘Sadat’s ideas for peace are very good, but prices are the danger in Egypt. Food prices are too high for the millions of ordinary people. America and Europe should give Sadat money to keep food prices down in the local markets.’

‘Subsidies.’

‘Exactly. Ordinary Egyptians want to see their lives improving now. If they don’t see that – phwee! – there’ll be a big bang!’

Riots against the price of food in every major city of Egypt had shaken Sadat in 1977 – the year the demonstrators in Alex had pulled all those television sets out of the vice-president’s villa. The mobs had cursed Sadat’s mollycoddling of the ‘new aristocracy’: the rich businessmen, the owners of gaudy boutiques and the patrons of the smart nightclubs on the Giza road. ‘Sadat Bey, Sadat Bey, you were born in a cabaret!’ Egypt’s sans-culottes had shouted through the streets.

Mohamed al-Hattab said good night, promising to reappear next day to introduce me to the master of the Al Wid.

Taking a turn before bed in the street that boasted the Greek consulate and the Ciné Chantecleer as well as the Hotel Bel Air, I thought of the Patrick Vieljeux pushing impatiently down through the Red Sea at that very moment. Outside the consulate, three grinning youths held up a magazine to show me the centrefold picture of a nude with an abundance of carroty pubic hair. ‘Look, sirrr!’ When I passed them again on my way back to the Bel Air, they were pushing the picture through the consul’s letterbox.

That afternoon the Saudi vessel Al Wid, built in Sweden in 1967 – the word ‘Styrhus’ was still there over the wheelhouse door – sailed for Aqaba and Jedda. At 3.50 p.m. the tug Omar eased us out of Suez dock. All around us small ships were ingesting long lines of poor Egyptians carrying baskets, boxes and crates. They had queued passively, if clamorously, since dawn, and the heat was their punishment.

Al Wid sailed leaving at least a hundred people on the quay. In a last look through my glasses, I saw them tramping dejectedly away, miserably humping Adidas and Alitalia bags: ochre-skinned men like those who had come aboard, with towels twisted around their heads like turbans, or in woollen caps, and wearing shoes that didn’t fit their wide, thick-soled peasant feet.

We bore south-west, through an anchorage of vessels that included a French warship. On the right-hand shore appeared the Suez refinery and a line of new housing in front of a dark escarpment.

I found a small cabin with two bunks in it, which the steward said I had to myself. It was hot, but not unbearable with the air conditioning on and the porthole closed. On the stairs I had seen portraits of King Faisal and King Khalid of Saudi Arabia, and an illuminated page or two from the Koran. Saudi Arabia is a dry state, but I had my Port Said Scotch in my bag. Al Wid was not another Al Anoud. The first-class dining room had middle-aged Egyptian waiters in white jackets, and there was a saloon where, my steward told me, videotaped television films would be shown at night. As it turned out, the films were Egyptian comedies with one exception: an American film about white mercenaries wiping out black men in Africa. The Egyptian audience sided unmistakably with the white mercenaries.

It was all certainly better than Al Anoud, even though a plaque informed me that the Swedes had licensed Al Wid for only four hundred and fifty passengers but she was carrying eight hundred to Aqaba and I don’t know how many more to Jedda. I felt no anxiety; there wouldn’t be much elbow room, but it was not far to Aqaba. I stifled the thought of what the effect of a collision at sea might have on a thousand Egyptians temperamentally alien to the concept of a boat drill. Oddly enough, I was more concerned by the discovery that the toilets were temperamental, although at least they were not permanently awash with urine and vomit as those of Al Anoud had been. On that ship the ultimate catastrophe would have been a loose bowel.

I am not particularly fussy about the absence of working toilets on small boats, for you can almost always find a convenient place to ease yourself over the side in reasonable safety and privacy. But on big ships you have nowhere to go. Their sides are too high for acrobatics and, in any case, the rail areas are too public. (Incidentally, if you fall from a big ship – or even from a relatively small big one – your chances of survival are virtually nil. Sea, wind and engines would overwhelm your cries, and you could wave until you were blue in the face but a ship’s wake or a swell would hide you. Once overboard, ten to one you’re a goner.)

Al Wid’s toilet facilities would do, but it would be wise, I decided, to use them early, before rush hour.

*

Ships headed north, converging on the narrow funnel of the canal. To the west, land disappeared; to the east a grey-white line hardened into cliffs of treeless, fissured rock. There were no fishing craft to be seen on the blue waters off the coast of Sinai.

During the night, Al Wid wove craftily through the reefs and islands south of Suez, which appear as an angry black rash on the charts. Next day the immigrant workers sat up on the decks where they had spent the night lying huddled together for comfort on benches or bare planking. Now they looked around and pointed to the coast, the terrible peninsula where in three wars – 1948, 1967, 1973 – fathers, brothers and cousins had died in their thousands of thirst, sunstroke, bullet wounds, burns, or even of sheer bewilderment and fear. El Arish, the Mitla Pass, Sharm el Sheikh are names on every Nile boy’s mental map of Egypt. Those places lay behind the shore we were now passing, and not a soul aboard could have been unaware of the fact. They peered over the rail in that unusual silence as the first rays lit the terrible shore of Sinai. Dreaming of a certainty of peace? Grieving for dead generations? Or forgetful of the past, not looking back at all, simply invoking the blessing of the One God on the new life that Al Wid was bringing nearer by the second?

The mood seemed to pass. Soon they pulled themselves back to the normal, vociferous world, and resumed their animated chatter – which, for peasant voices born and bred to carry long distances across villages and fields, meant something more like raucous shouting. Excited hands rummaged in the Adidas and Alitalia overnight bags and found country-made rusk-like sweet cakes (like English shortbread), fruit and flat bread, bits of processed cheese and stringy carrots bought a day or two before at a friendly stall in the delta. These rations might have to sustain them until Baghdad. They even had bottles of water. After the food they brought out photographs of relatives stiffly posed by village photographers, passed them around and then carefully reburied them, a shade more creased, under the spare shirt, towel and bathing wear in their overnight bags.

Then they explored the ship; they’d never been aboard one before. Woollen-capped swarthy heads rose cautiously over the tops of companion ways: was this a forbidden area? The ship was alive with laughter. Cabin doors opened and shut, and officers sharply ordered giggling passengers away from the sacrosanct engine room or the bridge. I, the only non-Egyptian aboard, was greeted with shouts of ‘Good morning, misterr!’ When they had inspected the ship with as much thoroughness as they would devote to a new water buffalo or a wife, they milled off to drink tea in the ship’s cafeteria and raucously debate their prospects in the unknown and immediate future that for eight hundred of them would begin at Aqaba.

Iraq was their destination from Aqaba, the port of Jordan. Aqaba, whose capture from the Turks by the Arab irregular armies of Faisal, Abdullah and Τ. Ε. Lawrence in the First World War had created the springboard for the offensive that eventually carried the Arab revolt in triumph to Damascus. Aqaba, where King Hussein went to water-ski, would be their springboard to an expatriate life in Mesopotamia. I knew their route; I had followed it several times myself. From the seaside town of Aqaba by truck or bus up the dramatic escarpment road, through the splendour of Wadi Rumm – where Lawrence and Faisal were bombed by Turkish biplanes – along the snaking track of the old Turkish-built Hejaz railway to Amman, the track that Lawrence spent so much time and effort blowing up. From Amman, Hussein’s capital, to Mafraq (which means crossroads), the hub town from which the roads to Damascus and to Baghdad radiate. Then the long, dreary desert crossing by bus to Iraq: the descent into the steamy lushness of the basin of the great twin rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, which keep Iraq alive, just as the Nile has sustained Egypt. Past Nineveh, perhaps, and Ctesiphon, the capital of the old Persian kings, past Babylon perhaps as far south as Ur of the Chaldees. The Nile to the Euphrates and Tigris: they wouldn’t know it, but Al Wid’s hopeful passengers were leaving one of the world’s nurseries of civilization for another as great.

It was an interesting experiment in human transplantation. Iraq, rich in oil and land and poor in population, and Egypt, nearly destitute and barely able to support a population that seemed hell-bent on doubling itself in a few decades, had come to an agreement. I had seen fellahin from the Nile clumping about the riverine towns of Iraq, easily distinguishable from the native peasants by their browner skins, round-necked galabiehs and speech (the accents and idioms of Egyptian Arabic are as strange to the Arabs of Iraq as the English spoken in Kansas is to the people of Yorkshire). But not only fellahin were transplanted. Young Egyptians with some minimal experience in hotels in Cairo are to be found in the hotels and restaurants of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. It is good to see them there, because however adept or inept they may be in their work they are always cheerful; Egyptians are inveterate jokers. Iraqis, on the other hand, like the English, feel that waiters’ work is mysteriously demeaning to the soul, and work off their humiliation on the diners.

*

As Al Wid steamed up toward Aqaba, there was no singing or drumming from the mass of Egyptians on her decks. Most noticeably, there were no transistors; these men were too poor or frugal for such dubious luxuries. After all, no pop group can ward off the Evil Eye.

Unlike Suez, the heat was dry here. The cliffs of both sides of the Gulf of Aqaba closed in: Arabia on the right, lifeless and bare; Sinai, still occupied by the Israelis on the left, with an occasional car or jeep speeding down a road parallel with the water.

‘Sinai, Egypt’s land!’ a ship’s officer announced, pointing to the coast. I handed my binoculars to a group of bejeaned Egyptians who said, ‘Thank you, misterrr,’ and passed them round, each one gaping at the strange mountain-girt bay and the ships we could now see anchored in it off the little port of Aqaba and, a little way to the west, the Israeli port of Elat. They goggled at the strange sight of an Arab and Israeli town side by side. ‘Is that Aqaba? Is that Elat? Is that Palestine? Is that Israel?’

In Arabic I asked them where they were heading. One said, ‘To Baghdad.’ Another: ‘To Basra,’ adding, ‘I’m a mechanic’ Someone asked, ‘Is Dohuk cold?’ (Dohuk is in northern Iraq.) ‘How far is Dohuk from Baghdad?’ ‘How far is Baghdad from Amman?’ ‘Is Baghdad like Cairo?’

An innocent abroad, more pushy than the rest, in a red and white sweater zipped up the front, said his name was Gamal – ‘But call me Jim.’ Like most of them he was going to Baghdad. ‘I have friends there. Look.’ He handed me a card from the Ibn Khaldoun Hotel with an Egyptian friend’s name on it. I had been to Baghdad recently to complete a book about the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and knew one or two Egyptians there. I gave him another Egyptian name – that of Samir, the head barman at the Dar es Salaam Hotel, a kind man who would no doubt help him over his first baffling, homesick days in a strange city. He tucked the name gratefully away in his wallet.

‘Are you nervous?’

‘Not a bit,’ he answered boldly. ‘People say there are thieves in Baghdad, but thieves are only people like me, aren’t they?’ Sententiously he added, ‘I am afraid only of God.’

I pointed out that he was taking this adventurous step into a country whose government was at loggerheads with his own. This meant nothing to him. He said, ‘You see, misterrr, I’ve eight brothers and five sisters in Cairo, so someone has to travel to find money and send it back to them. I am the eldest, so who else should go but me? I give myself ten years’ hard work abroad, suffering maybe, until I’m thirty. Then I’ll marry and take a settled job in Egypt. By then I should have saved enough for a house and a car. Am I right, misterrr?’

I said, ‘You are happy to go, it’s a duty to your family and you are not afraid. So you are right.’

‘Thank you, misterrr.’ I looked at Gamal’s – Jim’s – flushed and beaming face, the thick red hands with broken nails, and for some reason I thought of Sinatra in his tuxedo under the pyramids, facing that scintillating audience and singing to the Sphinx in the desert night.