'It is history,' Dr Ramzi says. 'The conjunction of certain conditions. After a hundred years the historians will say what happened was inevitable. If we look now at Egypt a hundred years ago we see that what happened was inevitable.'

'What happened?' Isabel says.

'We were a part of a dying Ottoman Empire. Our Khedive Ismail loved modernism and Europe and - le spectacle. He likes the Suez Ca.n.a.l project and so he borrows money. He is not careful where he borrows. He borrows from Europe - from Britain and the Rothschilds and France. At the same time - you see, here is the conjunction.' The index fingers of his two hands come together. 'Europe is strong and moving outwards -' a huge expansive gesture with the arms - 'colonialism is the spirit of the age. Their old enemy the Ottoman Empire is dying. So they use the Khedive's debts to expand into our part of it. Into Egypt. The rest is history.'

'And what about the national movement, ya Doctor?'

'The national movement did not matter. The British pretended they thought it threatened their money. They made it the reason for the Occupation. But they will have come anyway. They will find a way.'

'I don't think that's fair.' Deena pushes her spectacles up with a characteristic gesture. 'The British came in at a crucial point in our history. They froze our development: our move towards democracy, towards education, industrialisation, towards modernity -'

'Tayyib ya Setti, we have now fifty years - fifty-six years of our own - of national government, and what have we done?'

'Compare us,' Arwa says, 'to our cousins across the border. You think if the British hadn't helped them, if there had been no Balfour Declaration, there would be no Israel today? There would have been. They wouldn't have sat back and said, "Oh, but the British won't help us, the Sultan won't sell us Palestine, the Arabs won't go away -"

'But they were part of the whole colonial movement. They had the spirit of the age behind them.'

Mustafa al-Sharqawi has been standing silently by us, listening. Now Mahgoub turns to him. 'Why are you so quiet, ya Mustafa? It's not like you. Tell us what you think.'

Mustafa is a small intense man, with old-fashioned hornrimmed spectacles. If he had worn a beret he could have been at the Deux Magots in the Fifties.

'What do I think? I think we're a nation of cowards,' he says bitterly. 'I hate to say it, especially in front of a - guest. But we live by slogans. We take comfort in them: "The Great Egyptian People." "The peaceful, patient Nation, that when it is aroused shatters the World." Shatters the world? Tell me, when in all of history did the Egyptian people rebel? When? When Urabi spoke up for them, they sold him out. They ran away and let the British in. You'll say 1919, but 1919 wasn't a revolution. It was a few demonstrations and it changed nothing -'

'Slowly, slowly, ya Mustafa. 1919 -'

'Fifty-two? That was not a rebellion of the people. It was an army movement which rode the people and told the people that it spoke with their voice. The people have no voice.'

'What are we then?'

'We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people. The people don't know we exist.'

'The people know more than you think,' I say. 'They watch television. Out in the villages they have satellite dishes.'

'Good. And what do they watch on television? They watch censored news. They watch soaps - emasculated because television needs to sell them to our masters in the Gulf. They don't watch you -'

'What about the fundamentalists?' Isabel asks. 'Where do they come into all this? Would you say that they spoke with the voice of the people?'

'The fundamentalists are nothing,' Dr Ramzi says. 'They just need some food and a place to live -'

'They are the ones on the ground,' Mahgoub says. 'Can anyone explain how they've managed to occupy the amount of s.p.a.ce they have?'

'All the other parties have been hit,' says Deena. 'We've had fifty years of an absence of democracy -'

'They've been hit as much as any other party,' Mustafa al-Sharqawi says. 'They've been forced underground and they've come back. Their leaders were killed and they got new ones. Their economic projects turned out to be a fraud and their credibility survived. Their young men are killed every day and they recruit new ones. They will not go away. They've even taken the political platform - the idiom - of the left: they talk of social justice -'

'They have an Idea,' Arwa says, 'and their Idea appeals to the people because it reinforces who they are. It says hey, you don't have to become the dumping ground of the West. You're worth something. It appeals to those thousands of young men and women who go through school, through university, and then find the road blocked in their faces -'

'Have you heard the one about the lamp?' Mahgoub says. 'This young man is engaged and he can't find a flat to get married in. His girl is threatening to leave him and marry a rich Arab. As he's walking around one day hanging his head, he sees 'Ala ed-Din's lamp lying in the gutter. He can't believe himself; he picks it up and rubs it and the jinni comes out: "s...o...b..ik lobbeik, Khaddamak bein eidek, what do you desire?" "A flat, ya'ni, just a little flat: a bedroom and a hall and a little bathroom and kitchen." The jinni looks at him in disgust. "And if there was such a flat," he says, "would I be living in this d.a.m.n lamp?" '

Everybody bursts out laughing and I - with misgiving - translate the joke for Isabel, who nods and laughs.

Ghazali comes in with coffee for Dr Ramzi. 'Anybody ya bahawat wants sandwiches?'

'Yes. What do you have?' Dr Ramzi says.

'Ya'ni what would he have, ya Doctor?' Deena laughs. 'Cheese and roast beef. For thirty years he's had cheese and roast beef.'

Am Ghazali smiles. 'Today we have chicken as well.'

'Tayyib, I'll have chicken. Mind it's not rotten.'

We give our orders and Mustafa al-Sharqawi says: 'Am Ghazali, where will we be in the year two thousand?"

'We'll be under the protection of G.o.d by His grace.'

'There you are. See,' he says when Ghazali has gone: 'a cliche. It stops him having to think.'

'It stops him having to answer you,' Dr Ramzi says.

'That's the ground the Jama'at are using. The ready-made pieties,' Mustafa says.

'Ya akhi, no,' says Mahgoub. 'No. The pieties speak against killing and bombing. It all comes back to economics.'

'And government policy,' Deena says. 'They have been allowed s.p.a.ce. Encouraged even. When Sadat wanted to destroy the leftist movements, he encouraged them -'

'And not just Sadat,' Arwa adds, although she hated him. 'Who gave them the big push they needed in the Eighties? Who funded them and armed them in Afghanistan?'

'Would they come to power in free elections?' Isabel ventures.

There is a silence. A long silence. A man who's been shouting into the phone looks around in surprise and drops his voice. Then Deena says, 'Probably yes. They're organised. And funded. And they have a ready-made publicity machine in every mosque.'

'And then what?'

'And then they'd string us all up.'

'Would they really?'

'They'd be in a mess. They have no political programme beyond "Islam is the solution". Ask them any detailed question and they don't have an answer -'

'Do you realise,' Dr Ramzi says, smiling broadly, 'when you speak of a political programme, that your programme now is the same that Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi's government tried to establish more than a hundred years ago?'

'Is that right?' Isabel says.

'Yes. Yes, for sure,' Dr Ramzi says. 'Listen: the ending of foreign influence, the payment of the Egyptian debt -' he counts them off on his fingers - 'an elected parliament, a national industry, equality of all men before the law, reform of education, and allowing a free press to reflect all shades of opinion. Those were the seven points of their programme. These young people -' the wave of his hand takes in the group - 'they still ask for this.' He shrugs. Ghazali balances his tray on one hand and starts unloading it with the other.

'Do the fundamentalists want this too?'

'Possibly,' Mahgoub says. 'But they won't want the free press. And they'll put their own conditions on who can stand for parliament -'

'We went up to Minya a few days ago,' I say.

'Who went? You didn't take your guest with you, did you?'

'Yes. We went to our village. The number of barricades on the road was incredible. And on one of them we saw three young men, ordinary fallaheen, being arrested. They were tied with ropes. On their arms and necks.'

'It's become a war. Especially in the Said.'

'But I don't think those young men were terrorists, or even Islamists particularly -'

'When you set the police loose on people, khalas, they do anything.'

'The thing is, it's now getting mixed up with the land laws,' Deena says. 'If someone is close to the authorities and he wants people off his land, he can use the "terrorist" issue and get rid of them. We are doc.u.menting cases but it's difficult to convince a fallah to start a legal action. But some are doing it.'

'They closed down our school,' I say. 'And I got someone to speak to the Governor and he said we could open it if we gave him a list of the people who'd be teaching there. It's only a couple of cla.s.ses where the kids come to study in the evenings -'

'You can't give lists of names to the Governor,' Deena says, 'and n.o.body'll give you such a list anyway.'

'Centuries of mistrust,' Dr Yusuf says. 'You cannot get out of your history.'

'I know,' I say.

'Ya Doctor, history can be changed,' Deena says, 'it's people who make history. The problem is that we are allowing other people to make our history -'

'But it's people with power who make history,' Arwa says, 'and we have no power. At least when there were two superpowers in the world, we could negotiate a path in the s.p.a.ce between them. Now there is no s.p.a.ce.'

'We do have power,' Deena says. 'We're being told we haven't - but we have. But to use it we have to have the will. And we can't afford to be rich against poor, Copt against Muslim -'

'I believe the Islamists could be defused if we had a true democracy,' Mahgoub says. 'If everybody, and they too, were allowed to speak publicly. To debate the issues in front of the people. Put them on television, in a proper free debate with Muslim intellectuals, with the Sheikh of al-Azhar -'

'People will switch off,' Mustafa says. 'Salamu aleik.u.m. None of this will come to anything. I have to go.'

'What's the rush?' Mahgoub says. 'Stay with us.'

'No, I'm going. I'll leave you to put the universe right.' And raising his arm in a general salute, he leaves.

'The government won't do that anyway,' Deena says. 'It opts for the security solution and it tries to outbid the Islamists in the religious stakes: we're more Muslim than you. And so it plays their game.'

'What popularity they have is because the people need an Idea. In Na.s.ser's time - for all its drawbacks, all the mistakes - there was an Idea. A national project. Now what do we have? The Idea of the Consumer? Trying to hang on to America's hem -'

'Where will you get a national project now?' Dr Ramzi asks. 'You think you can sit here and design a national project? And what is the end of Na.s.ser's project anyway? What is the outcome?'

'Ya Doctor, a national project comes about as an embodiment of the will of the people,' Arwa says. 'Na.s.ser's project finally did not work because for the people to have a will it has to have a certain amount of s.p.a.ce and freedom, freedom to question everything: religion, politics, s.e.x -'

'So the sans-culottes had freedom and s.p.a.ce?'

'No, and your revolution here will be an Islamist radical one. Because every other ideology is bankrupt. And capitalism isn't an ideology, it isn't something that people can live by - and in our case it just makes people discontented. Look at the advertis.e.m.e.nts on television. Advertis.e.m.e.nts for things people can't have if they saved up for ten lifetimes -'

'They're for the ones with palaces in 'Agami,' Mahgoub says. People, I think, like Tareq Atiyya.

'You know,' Isabel says, 'we have that problem in the States: the widening gap between rich and poor. Some people see it as a threat already. I read an article that compared life in America now to the last years of the Roman Empire.'

'Capitalism,' Arwa smiles. 'In a word.'

'It seems to me,' says Isabel, after a moment, 'that people are completely caught up in trying to a.n.a.lyse the situation. But no one says, "This is what we should do." '

'I don't think anyone knows what we should do,' I say.

'I know some things we should do,' Deena says. 'We should speak out against the sanctions on Iraq. We should put a time limit on this so-called peace process. What's the use of sitting around talking peace when the Israelis are constantly changing the landscape - putting things on the ground that will be impossible to dismantle?'

'And when the time came, you'd go to war?' Isabel asks.

'If we had to. And I would stop this charade of "normalisation". What normalisation is possible with a neighbour who continues to build settlements and drive people off the land? Who has an a.r.s.enal of nuclear weapons and screams wolf when someone else is suspected of having a few missiles? And it is our business - because what's happening to the Iraqis or the Palestinians today will happen to us tomorrow.'

'And when America cuts off your aid?' Mahgoub says, with a mischievous glance at Isabel.

'What aid? Do you know that 70 per cent of what they give us feeds directly back into the American economy? Directly, mind you. You think they give us aid because they want to help us? Personally, I'd close the door anyway. I'd mobilise the people to get our economy straight -'

'They can't do that. Too many powerful people have links to the West now. Money links. Big business.'

'There you have it!' Deena sits back. 'The interests of the governing cla.s.s are different - are practically opposed to the interests of the majority of the people.'

'Ya Deena ya 'Ulama!' A man stands by the phone, waving the receiver at Deena. She jumps up. 'It's my son,' she says. 'I told him he could call me here.'

'Khalas ya Mahgoub,' Arwa says. 'It's either Israeli domination - backed by America - or the Islamist radicals. Take your pick.'

'Neither this nor that. We'll keep both out,' Mahgoub says. He turns to Isabel. 'You know, your government,' he says; 'all the Americans I meet are good people, but your government's foreign policy is so bad. It's not good, you know, for a country to be hated by so many people.'

'Well,' Isabel says, 'as I said, some people think we are already in decline. Moral decline.'

'History,' Dr Ramzi says. 'This is all -' he waves his hand - 'nothing. Egypt has been here so long. It has seen many things. In the next millennium - it will still be Egypt.'

17.

But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand In starless nights and wait the 'pointed hour.

John Dryden It can't be that bad. Surely it can't be that bad. There must be a way, only we can't see it yet. A way of making a s.p.a.ce for ourselves where we can make the best of ourselves - we just can't quite see it yet. But things move on and by the time you've plotted your position the world around you has changed and you're running - panting - to catch up. How can you think clearly when you're running? That is the beauty of the past; there it lies on the table: journals, pictures, a candle-gla.s.s, a few books of history. You leave it and come back to it and it waits for you - unchanged. You can turn back the pages, look again at the beginning. You can leaf forward and know the end. And you tell the story that they, the people who lived it, could only tell in part.

3 April 1901 No message. No note. Nothing. We have been back three days.

James Barrington knows something - enough. I deemed it best to remain as faithful as possible to the truth. Indeed, now that I have made the journey I do not see how an account depicting myself and Sabir travelling alone into the Sinai would be in the least believable. I did, however, omit the first section of our adventures and had us meet Sharif Pasha's party in the Eastern Desert where, learning of our destination and being bound that way themselves, they took us under their protection.