The Road to Safaga

I drove this road a lot. It crossed the low dry rocky mountains between Qena and the Red Sea coast. I tooled up the coast road – smooth with little traffic. Unlike the valley road north - with the hustle of donkeys invisible under loads of sugarcane or berseem, three wheelers covered with decals, icons and jangling amulets, foreign trucks driven by horny Turks with pinups in the cab, overloaded buses challenging the speed records, and broken down Citroen’s with stolen antiquities in their trunks. The desert was a relief from the Nile valley.

You wanted to avoid driving the Safaga road at night. The big trucks drove without their lights and only turned them on when they thought there was something they should look at. That would be me in many cases, in my plucky little Suzuki Sidekick, lights ablaze. I would be negotiating a hairpin turn on an unfenced curve with a 500 foot drop-off into the wadi below and suddenly came the dazzle of their headlights.

I don’t understand this practice common all over the Levant. Why? Burnt out headlamps maybe? It’s not as if you save any power by not turning on the lights. Even the baladi clunkers are equipped with bright and dim lights like automobiles everywhere. Arrogant hawaga, I was using my brights and dimming for traffic. The locals were much more likely to simply flash their lights on and off to indicate they were annoyed at me using any lights at all. I would be dazzled and unable to see the edge of that moment’s precipice.

Safaga was a dusty nowhere port down on its luck. The tourists were all in Hurghada. I never paid much attention to it, drove through without stopping. Once we ate baby water buffalo there. In 1991 or 1992 there was a ferry that sank on its way to Safaga from Arabia across the Red Sea. It was the story of the hour on TV and in the Wafd, a newspaper I was then plodding through daily with my battered green paperback Arabic dictionary now sitting on the dictionary shelf here in Texas. That sinking took place at night like this one. Some of the men were still up drinking coffee, maybe having a sheesha. Women and children were in their cabins. Out of some hundreds on the ship one woman was saved. I pictured them swimming in those black tents the women would be wearing. I saw them trying to hold their children. I saw the men clamoring into the lifeboats.

I had been on an Egyptian ferry not long before, crossing the Mediterranean from Latakia to Alexandria. The captain invited me to his cabin. God, they’re all alike, aren’t they? He told me the ship was to be scrapped after this journey. Would I like to join him in Cyprus tomorrow morning? I brought along the Egyptian woman sharing my stateroom which cooled his enthusiasm. She was to crop up in my Levantine life at several odd turning points and she would die in my car on the desert road from Cairo to Alexandria in a couple of years.

This Friday maybe 1000 people drowned in the Red Sea out from Safaga. The newspapers tell us they were Egyptian workers in the rich Saudi economy and returning pilgrims. They don’t know, of course, but that could be predicted. Maybe there was a lone Australian backpacker who had done the hajj and was on a year off from work as a software engineer in Kuala Lumpur. An old man from Esna visiting his new grandchild in Riyadh. A Yemeni accountant, a Syrian anesthesiologist, a writer, a candlestick maker. Lots of women. Lots of children.