The Sterile Bay

The camel caravan crested a low gravel ridge and the desert simply stopped. Below lay a scatter of flat mud-brick buildings the same color as the ground, running down to a sheet of green-blue water where a thin forest of masts stood off the shore. The wind carried salt, coffee, and hides. Welcome to Suez in 1814 — a half-ruined, sand-drifted port city of a few thousand souls that existed purely because the Red Sea had to be met somewhere, and where every drop of drinking water was hauled in by…