The caravan road tops a low gravel ridge and the desert simply stops.
Description
The caravan road tops a low gravel ridge and the desert simply stops. Below lies a scatter of flat mud-brick the same colour as the ground, running down to a sheet of green-blue water where a thin forest of masts stands off the shore. There is no garden, no palm, no green thing anywhere in it. The wind carries salt, coffee and hides.
A half-ruined, sand-drifted town of a few thousand souls, existing purely because the Red Sea has to be met somewhere. Ottoman soldiers are everywhere — Muhammad Ali’s Arabian war runs its supply through this port, and grain, powder and troops for Jeddah have first call on everything, including hulls.
Notable Features
- No sweet water of its own. Every drop is hauled in by camel from wells miles out or ferried across the gulf, and it is brackish and sold by the skin. Water is the main commodity worked on the streets. A party that has just crossed eighty-four miles of gravel arrives somewhere that charges them to drink.
- The Frankish quarter, near the waterfront — the handful of European agents, the Company house, and the cellar bar.
- Ottoman military presence. A permanent encampment, and a commissariat with a standing claim on any seaworthy hull in the bay.
- Street food. Curried goat on a stick, among other things, from vendors working the lanes.
Connections
- Reached at the end of the Cairo–Suez caravan road under Hassan al Rashidi, who paid off his drivers and parted from the party at the edge of town (Session 7).
- Luca Mancini pointed the party toward the Frankish waterfront before going his own way.
- East India Company Office Suez — where Freddy’s Board of Control paperwork and the Hugh Cavendish name secured lodgings.
- Suez Waterfront — where Holt failed to find a hull, and where the Shah Alam was taken at dawn.
- The Watering Hole — the cellar bar where the Shah Alam tip was passed and Elizabeth Ashby told her story.
Appearances
Relationships
- Part of Egypt — Ottoman Egypt's Red Sea port at the head of the gulf
- Borders Wadi al Tih — The eastern terminus of the Cairo–Suez caravan road that runs through the wadi
Places Within
East India Company Office Suez
A whitewashed building near the harbour flying the Company flag — half a dozen desks, and cool enough inside to be worth the walk.
Suez Waterfront
A busy, shallow harbour crowded with small coastal craft working grain and pilgrim routes up to Jeddah and Yanbu — none of them fit to cross an ocean.
The Watering Hole
A vaulted basement in the Frankish quarter, hollowed out of the ruins of a former two-storey building — the only cool room in Suez and the reason everyone in it stays until closing.