As we sat talking at the checkpoint, Colonel Mohsen kept getting calls and texts on his two phones. What’s going on? we asked. They are raiding state security headquarters, he said. We all knew who ‘they’ were – the fundamentalists, the Egyptian police’s bogeyman for everything that has ever happened. Where, we all asked, Cairo? No, here, he said. Alexandria? Let’s go there, I said. The colonel shook his head. It’s very bad. There’s an exchange of fire. My friend didn’t look keen so I sat back down.
Once I hit the crystal-blue waters, I knew I had made the right decision. An entirely unexplored and totally preserved Roman road lay three metres beneath me as I trod water. I could see it, and the pattern of the Ptolemaic harbour that had subsided into the sea in a fourth-century earthquake, with the naked eye. I could dive down and nose my way around streets and the foundations of buildings that had lain untouched for the last 1,500 years. Looking back to land, olive groves and pine forest stretched up from an empty, spectacular coastline to a plateau some five miles inland. It could have been Calabria, or Croatia, or Thrace, with one difference. There was nobody here. This was the pre-modern Libyan coast, the Med before tourism hit it.
Two pictures of Khaled Said lie side by side across the Internet. If you can, right now, I’d like to suggest you use Google Images to search for ‘Khaled Said’. Be warned. It could make you cry and it’s not for kids. But it will show you why there was a revolution in Egypt.