contents →
Hurghada
April 2024
I. Locals
The sea was closed. The fish—wet, cool, dead—lay atop ice. The ice dripped; outside, the sun rose. The morning was mostly silent.
Only two of the fish market’s twenty-something stalls were manned, and one of the two had nothing to sell. Egrets gathered on the metal crossbeams overhead, punctuating the silence with battle cries as they jostled for spots nearest the fish. The fishmonger was vigilant. He sat on his plastic chair, one leg tucked beneath him, dressed as though in a Youssef Chahine film—as though he were only playing the part of a fishmonger. I had no interest in buying fish, and he had no interest in me. Instead, I was interested in the action, in the scene of men and boats and scales I’d pictured in my head, but the fish market was deserted, and the gate to the docks outside hadn’t yet opened. I sat, wondering. When I turned to the fishmonger with my question, his answer was well-rehearsed: the sea is closed.
It was April, and the sea would remain closed until mid-July. What the phrase really meant was a ban on fishing in the Red Sea. If the austerity of its wording was ever remarkable to the fishmonger, it was clearly no longer so. His demeanor was indifferent. I kept prodding: Why the ban? Since when? His lips formed a conspiratorial grin. It was the grin of a person who knows more than you do, who speaks in code waiting for you to catch on. There was joy to be had in conspiring. He said that fishing has been banned during the summer reproductive season for a few years now, to protect the fish stocks. Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he said that it wasn’t really about fish. It was all about money.
As I mulled over his words, three boys appeared near us, searching for flesh. They carried a plastic bag and a flimsy fishing rod, and their footsteps were swallowed by the concrete floor. The fishmonger pointed to a nearby discard bin and told them to be careful.
I was curious now, and the fishmonger was bored. He turned away from the egrets, and, without losing his grin, told me what he knew. He’d been a fisherman for dozens of years before, fishing Egypt’s inland waters. Most of Egypt’s fish comes from those waters; less than five percent comes from the Red Sea. And if he knew anything, it was that the ban on fishing was so that the fish farmers of the delta—the big guys—could flood the market with their mullet and tilapia. I nodded towards his stall, which had no mullet or tilapia, and asked where his fish came from. Port Said, he said, Mediterranean; but he still had some barracuda and parrotfish from before the ban. I’d missed the fishing season by just a few days.
At six, the docks opened. Its gated entrance was adjacent to the fish market and led down to a small harbor where the nearshore water was hidden by a thicket of small boats, all painted bright cyan. A single concrete jetty extended from the shore. At its far end a twenty-meter trawler, which set out before the ban, had just returned from sea.
The gate was manned by a soldier responsible for letting people and vehicles into the docks. I entered hesitantly, but when the soldier said nothing I quickened my step and continued down to the base of the jetty. A small crowd was gathered at its far end offloading the trawler, including seven men who were pulling its huge nets onto the bed of a pickup truck. Despite the size of everything—the boat, the nets, the crew, the anchors at the bow—the few crates of fish they unloaded were pitiful. I merged into the crowd trying my best to look uninterested, unobjectionable. No one paid any attention. The boys who were combing the fish market for bait arrived and began fishing from the jetty. Several more boys arrived and stripped down to their underwear and flip flops, then took a plunge in the green, torpid water.
Another twenty-meter trawler announced itself a short while later. Its sailors were standing on deck or leaning against the rails as the boat maneuvered into the narrow harbor. A soldier (perhaps the same one from the gate, perhaps different) walked up to the boat for a roll call. Once the boat was docked, the dozen or so sailors aboard—some not yet twenty and others old enough to be their grandfathers—listened attentively for their names. They were mostly still and mostly quiet, gazing randomly this way or that like kindergarteners sitting on a classroom carpet. It was just past seven and the sun burned brightly in the sky. One of the not-yet-twenty sailors picked an ice cube from a nearby crate and sucked on it. Each time a name was called and a sailor answered, the crew giggled and looked at each other guiltily, as though hiding bad report cards. Then the roll call ended, and with a loud clap and a yalla! the men remembered themselves, and a flurry of activity resumed.
Among the crowd was a Mr. Salem—a man with clear authority, a bureaucrat in civilian clothes rather than a military man—who was overseeing everything. He was the first to acknowledge my presence. He walked past me with a small entourage and, without stopping, told me to follow him. I did. He and his entourage walked up to where the roll call had just ended, then he turned to me and said, “You’re here to take pictures, right? Go on, take.”
I had my phone out earlier, but now I just stood and watched. The men cleaned out the trawler and a couple of motorized pickup trikes had driven down the jetty to haul away its catch. One of the fishermen, wearing a rubber apron and boots over his blue jumper, produced a long, shiny tuna from somewhere deep in the hold. He ignored the pickups and headed towards shore, tuna in hand, attracting behind him a pack of sniffing and whistling men. One man next to me extended an enterprising good morning. The tuna man replied, “It’s Mr. Salem’s.”
When I returned a couple mornings later with my camera, I arrived at six exactly to find the gate locked, a different soldier on duty. Four men were sitting on the sidewalk by the entrance, and a young boy loitered nearby with a plastic bag. The docks were to remain closed, announced the soldier. Mukhabarat’s orders.
The men on the sidewalk were fishermen, and their boats were inside. Unlike the trawlermen from before, these fishermen owned their craft, the small cyan vessels that filled the docks and which they referred to as feluccas. Even with the fishing ban in place, they spent their mornings tending to their vessels—tidying, scraping, untying, reknotting. The soldier had made it clear no one was entering, but the fishermen continued to wait because there was nothing better to do at six in the morning, or because a rule which springs up overnight always brings in its wake loopholes and exceptions.
Pressure was already piling on the soldier. More fishermen arrived, and with each arrival the complaints grew. Armed with nothing, the soldier resorted to pity.
“You will hurt me like this,” he said, shutting down any pleas and protests. It went without saying that he did not make the rules, and just as the rules might hurt the fishermen, breaking them would hurt the soldier. This worked for a few minutes, but it was not long before more fishermen arrived and the arguments started anew. At last, an offer took shape: those who wanted to enter could do so for just fifteen minutes, and they had to leave their national ID card with the soldier. The echo of the word mukhabarat still lingered. There were no takers.
I took a seat on the sidewalk facing the four fishermen, three of whom were in their thirties and grumbled about the situation with annoyance but a light heart. The fourth was older, with silver hair and deep wrinkles, a nose rounded down by decades of wind, and large, mournful eyes. He sat silently.
The group’s focus turned to me. I had declared my intention to the soldier upon arrival, loud enough for everyone to hear: I was there to photograph the nearby mosque, Masjid al-Mina, from the docks. My camera was in a bag slung over my shoulder. At this early hour, the sun would be rising from the sea and framing the mosque in soft orange light. One of the middle-aged fishermen said tourists usually photograph the mosque from its courtyard, a hundred meters from where we were sitting. The suggestion was repeated, perhaps earnestly but in a probing sort of way, to which I replied I was not a tourist.
They were curious about me, and I was also curious about them. My fascination with the ocean extended to those who fished it, but my past work in ocean literacy had made me suspicious of the fishing industry. More than climate change or pollution, it was overfishing that devastated the sea. (The best analogy I have yet found is in the opening lines of Charles Clover’s The End of the Line: “Imagine what people would say if a band of hunters strung a mile of net between two immense all-terrain vehicles and dragged it at speed across the plains of Africa.”) The culprit, typically, was the commercial fishing industry and its trawlers. Small fishermen were often overlooked or praised. Yet in the preceding and following months of travel along the Red Sea, I had met divers and conservationists who were adamant that the Red Sea’s marine life is paltry now compared to a few decades ago, and that no one was blame-free. In their view, the small-time fisherman who used to haul in five tons would now be lucky if he hauled in one, but of course he wouldn’t admit it. He knew the sea was running out of fish and wanted to get his share of the catch before it all ran out.
I did not say all of this to the fishermen. Instead, I asked, “Is there less fish now compared to before?”
One of the younger ones replied, “No. Don’t you see all the boats?” The sea was still full of fish, and the proliferation of fishing boats was evidence. If there was nothing to catch, there wouldn’t be so many boats.
The others concurred, and I dropped the matter. There was a brief silence, and then I asked, “What do you do during the months when fishing is banned?”
This time they answered immediately, in near unison. “We sit around, like we’re sitting now.”
“We look at our children and our children look at us.”
“We beg—no, we don’t beg. God willing.”
The older man who was silent before said they were supposed to receive money from the government. His expression was forlorn, and he spoke with a lump in his throat. The other men quickly chimed in, validating what he said and spinning jokes with it. Though the government gave fishermen money during the off-season, it was not a large sum and obtaining it wasn’t easy.
But there are other means—and here they began whispering—to get by. They whispered about smuggling, about drugs. They whispered that the docks were closed for this reason, that the mukhabarat caught wind of a big operation. A question was directed at the older man, asking if he wasn’t once caught. By the Israelis during the war of attrition, he said, and not for drugs. He wasn’t a smuggler, he was a fedayee. Their words streamed in a roundabout way and it took me a moment to catch on. When the conversation waned they were all shaking their heads, scoffing. Those who stay in line get stopped, one of them said. Those who stray get ahead.
When still more fishermen arrived and it became clear that the soldier wouldn’t budge, the gathering crowd began to reconsider his deal. They filed through the gate and handed him their ID cards. The boy with the plastic bag who had been hanging around this whole time was too young to have an ID card, but the soldier gave him a talking to and let him in. Only the old man was left, and me. He refused to accept the arrangement, resisting the pleas of the younger men who stood up to enter, refusing with the sternness of principle. When the men saw that he would not be convinced, that the lump in his throat was growing and his words were coming out stunted and malformed, they entered without him.
We sat silently for a while, and I found myself thinking of words to console the old man. I could tell he was upset, and when the others left they took with them the pretense that this was simply how things were, that everything could be forgiven. I felt distressed for the fisherman, but I could think of nothing to say to him.
After the soldier gathered himself, he asked if I still wanted to enter and take photos. I obliged respectfully, and when I got up the old fisherman was left sitting on the sidewalk alone. The soldier called him. He got up, swallowing his pride. Out of deference I stopped to let him enter first. The soldier, hardly twenty-five, assumed his own deference. He offered something of an apology to the man as he took our IDs, and the fisherman replied with something of an acknowledgement—conceding at least that the rules were beyond the soldier’s control. Neither could address the other the way they perhaps wanted to, but the unexpected kindness triggered something. Words that were corked up now came pouring out of the old man.
“You’re a soldier and you sit around here telling people they can’t see their own boats? I served the army when things were shit—truly shit—and now I have my own boat and my own license, and I do everything the government wants. And you sit here telling me I can’t enter? I can’t see my boat?”
When I later found him, the old man was by the jetty, leaning against an overturned vessel. He was gazing across the water at his boat. Moored some twenty meters offshore, it looked like all the other small boats in the harbor, distinguished only by a red covering that hid its outboard engine. Near the bow, a small trapezoidal structure, hardly a meter long, provided the only shelter from sun and sky. On this boat he would spend up to nine nights away at sea. He went with a deckhand—a boy—or he went alone.
He repeated to me that the fish were fine, that they were not decreasing. Everything in this world is given by God, he said—the Emiratis and the Saudis were given oil, we were given this sea and its fish. The best time to catch fish is when they come here to lay their eggs. If we don’t catch them, they leave. It is like growing cotton and not picking it, like letting it rot in the field. He may have seen a connection between the health of the fish and the ban, but I did not ask. His eyes were wet, and his face was still raw. His gaze, fixed ahead, remained steady on his boat.
Masjid al-Mina (lit. ‘The Port Mosque’)
II. Tourists
The Friday sermon at Masjid al-Mina, that grand, multi-domed mosque sandwiched between the Hurghada Port Authority and shipyard on one side and the fish market, docks, and marina on the other, began with a tale of the sea. I could say that I tried not to read into it, that the sermon was only a sermon, but in truth it was more. We were in a mosque perched on the water’s edge, in a city defined by the tourism its marine life brings, and the Friday sermon began not like the countless ones I’d heard before in Alexandria, Cairo, and elsewhere, but with a tale of the sea. Narrative prevails, I thought to myself—the part reflects the whole.
The imam was relating the stories of Noah and Yunus, to each of whom God sent a figurative rescue boat. (In Islam, the prophet Yunus was thrown overboard off a storm-stricken ship by its superstitious crew and swallowed by a whale.) Golden light filled the mosque, streaming in from the translucent windows and overhead chandeliers. It was noon, but inside it was cool. A dozen fans and air conditioners stirred the flower-infused air, which was still prickly with the texture of air freshener. The floor was lined with cushiony red carpeting on which hundreds of us were seated, cross-legged or knees up, listening to the imam on his wooden minbar. He was a youthful man with a glowing face. His body animated his words, and his words filled the mosque through the loudspeakers.
The imam spoke of merchants and trade. He identified anyone with a boat as belonging to this category (in addition to shopkeepers, hawkers, and wholesalers), and reminded them that trade must be conducted with fairness and without exploitation. We were, inside the mosque, having a kind of frank, one-way discussion. Each merchant is a representative of Islam, the imam said, and in the words unsaid: stop cheating the tourists.
He told an anecdote. A few weeks earlier, Ramadan had ended and Eid al-Fitr began. To mark the beginning of Eid, a prayer is held in the early hours of the morning, just after sunrise. Huge congregations gather and overflow into the courtyards of mosques and onto the street, and prayer typically lasts for the better part of an hour. The imam said that during the last Eid prayer, a group of seven tourists were wandering about when they came across a congregation deep in prayer. They were awed by the group’s unity, by their steadfast resolve at that early hour, by how their every move followed that of the imam leading them in prayer. The sight triggered something in the tourists. When they returned to their hotel, they converted to Islam.
I wondered who among the congregation left the mosque with renewed morals, and who among it left believing the imam’s anecdote. I was not sure if I believed it. In the courtyard of the mosque, the tourists were already gathered, cameras in hand, waiting for prayer to end and for the mosque to empty. I wondered if they could tell, standing there beneath the naked sun, that we had been talking about them.
Weeks before I arrived in Hurghada, I was searching online for hostels. It was not a difficult task; there were plenty inside the city. One place, called Africa Mama Hostel, seemed fine enough, so I rang them up and a very polite Egyptian man answered the phone in English.
Good evening, I said in Arabic, and asked if they had any availability for the dates I would be visiting.
The man said yes, switching to Arabic as well. He said he thought so, but he would double check.
A moment later he confirmed. But there was something he wanted to know: was I Egyptian?
I was.
He was very sorry. The owners are German, he explained, and they don’t allow Egyptian guests.
Oh, I said, or something similar.
The man was very sorry.
I tried another booking site, ignoring such listings as “Sweet Home 5—No Egyptian”, and eventually succeeded in finding a place. By the time I drove down to Hurghada, I had forgotten about the matter. When I arrived, I called the number of my accommodation to figure out the exact address and again, the pause: are you Egyptian? The owner of the apartment-turned-hostel swore that he never lets Egyptians stay—and he was Egyptian—but he’d make an exception for me because I was already there. Egyptians, he explained, have unreasonable expectations, leave bad reviews, and don’t treat the place well. (A few days later, he was happy to report that the other guests—two Europeans—found me very acceptable.)
If much has been said about the ways tourism changes the relationship between citizen and foreigner, there was in Hurghada an interesting case in how it changes the relationship between citizens and themselves. As with fish, there was crowding around another resource brought by the sea: the tourist, or, the money the tourist brings—the two were indistinguishable. As a result of this competition a frontier-like ethic, territorial and enterprising in its nature, prevailed. The legality of discrimination based on nationality was irrelevant—the tourist’s money was law. Even the government subscribed to this simple logic, and in a city like Hurghada, besieged by sun and salt, everyday battles played out over spiritual and corporeal things. The imam’s sermon was an example of the former. The latter I stumbled upon at a Russian restaurant.
I arrived in the afternoon, having driven around the place several times because many Hurghada streets are not navigable the way Google Maps insists they are. The restaurant was in an area of tall apartment buildings and narrow, poorly paved streets. Many foreigners lived there; on the corner of the same street was a German bakery. The Russian restaurant was a small shop on the ground floor of a residential building, square-like in layout, with a long counter dividing the space into two. I expected a Russian owner, but it was run by an Egyptian named Emad, a healthy-looking man in his early forties with pale skin and an energetic temperament. He had opened the restaurant with his ex-wife, a Kyrgyz woman who used to work alongside him in the kitchen of a nearby resort. The restaurant they started together outlived their brief marriage, and now Emad ran the place from A to Z.
Emad takes considerable pride in his cooking. Though he had never been to Russia, he’d been a chef for almost twenty years and cooked all the items on the menu, including Western, Russian, and Central Asian dishes. Inside, two Russian women were sitting together and eating beef stroganoff. They were in their forties or fifties, overweight, and bright pink. With them was an Egyptian man, barrel-chested and dark-skinned, in his early thirties. He was watching a football game on his phone as the two women ate. The women began bickering in Russian, but he spoke a few words and they stopped.
He got up and began speaking to Emad. One of the two women—I could not tell which—was his fiancé. He complained that the government was making it very difficult to get married. He seemed to be having trouble with some paperwork; as far as I could understand, obtaining a residence permit for his fiancé had gotten much more expensive and tedious. The easiest way to keep her in the country would be as a tourist, but that meant paying visa fees every few months, in euros. It also meant other costly troubles that I did not comprehend. The man was clearly in a bind.
He does not say it directly, but what he was really complaining about was that he’d been competing with the government for the same source of income, and the government was beating him. He returned to the pink women eating their beef stroganoff, and soon they all left. Afterwards, Emad clued me in. He was drenched in sweat; every order that came, whether dine-in or take-out, was prepared by him in the half of the shop that formed the kitchen. There was no fan or hood. Preparing an order of manti, Emad was kneading dough on the countertop and discussing what had just unfolded, when our conversation took a strange turn.
“Compared to the foreigner,” he said somberly, wearing a smile as though for my own comfort, “the Egyptian is stronger at sex. You see—”
I followed Emad’s pseudoscientific analysis as best I could, drawn in by his gallant, self-assured manner. The barrel-chested man, the pink woman—Emad explained this unusual but not uncommon pairing of young Egyptian men and older European women. It was not quite prostitution, but the difference was semantic. It happened here in the city and in the resorts which dotted the coast. It began amorphously but could quickly draw in papers and contracts. To bypass the country’s laws, for instance, a quick marriage certificate could be drawn up so that the two were legally married, and could, among other things, book a hotel room together. Money was foundational: when such a couple walks into a restaurant it is understood whose money covers the bill, even if the man gets up to pay. It was the logic of tourism taken to its limits. It was the ultimate enterprise, and its jealous safeguarding—against other men and women, against the government—the ultimate territoriality. From afar, it almost looks like love.
Adjacent to my hostel, a wooden boat rests inside an unfinished building. Another is parked on the street.
By the 90s and 2000s, the Red Sea had become a well-established holiday destination for European vacationers. It is the world’s northernmost tropical sea, and, compared to alternatives like the Caribbean or the Laccadive, the closest to Europe. When Sinai returned to Egypt in 1982 after the Camp David Accords, the Red Sea was already prominent within diving circles and the nascent freediving community. By the turn of the millennium, however, years of targeted development by the Egyptian government had attracted a new type of traveler: the package holidayer.
The package holidayer was just as likely to swim in a turquoise pool as the turquoise sea, and was far more likely than the diving enthusiast to buy Chinese-made statuettes at the newly-sprouted souvenir shops. So the landscape changed, but the coast remained large enough to share. The die-hard divers who first popularized the Red Sea in Europe still had their communities in Dahab and Marsa Alam; Cairenes flocked to nearby Ain El Sokhna with their families in the summer; places like Sharm El Sheikh and El Gouna grew from almost nothing into word-class resort towns where international conferences and film festivals are hosted. Hurghada, already the capital and largest city of Egypt’s Red Sea Governorate before the tourism boom, became a melting pot of all the above.
It is not uncommon to hear of visitors who come to Hurghada and decide to stay. Aside from the millions who land in Hurghada International Airport each year, there are a few dozen thousand foreigners who are long-term residents of the city, a significant majority of whom are Russian. There are at least two Russian schools in the city, a Russian Orthodox Church, and a Russian consulate. There are several Telegram channels for Russians in Hurghada—one of which has more than eight thousand members—covering everything from social hangouts to property listings and job opportunities. (Money isn’t hard to come by. For those who don’t work remotely, freelance as instructors, lease property back home, or ration their savings, resorts frequently hire foreigners—and pay them in euros.)
A major setback confronted this Russian community in October 2015, when a Russian airliner departing from Sharm El Sheikh to Saint Petersburg exploded shortly after takeoff. A bomb, claimed by the Islamic State’s Sinai Province, had been snuck aboard the aircraft while it was in Sharm El Sheikh International Airport. The attack killed all 224 passengers and crew on board, nearly all of whom were Russian. Immediately afterwards, Russia suspended all direct flights between the two countries, causing a tremendous drop in Russian holidayers in Egypt. It wasn’t until August 2021, six years later, that this ban was fully lifted.
Months later, however, in February 2022, came the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Egypt was navigating economic hardships due to the pandemic’s effects on tourism and the subsequent decline in foreign currency inflow, and the war compounded the country’s troubles. Egypt is among the world’s biggest importers of wheat, and most of that wheat came from Ukraine and Russia. The war caused wheat prices in the country to rise by more than 40%. More critically, the war had triggered capital flight around the world as investments were pulled out of developing economies, and Egypt lost more than $20 billion to capital outflow. If the economy was slipping before, it was now in crisis.
Against this backdrop, life in Hurghada and Egypt continued, affected in nearly every conceivable way by a significantly devalued currency. Ukrainian tourist numbers plummeted, and the recovery of Russian tourism in Egypt took a big hit. For those who were already in the country and whose savings were in a foreign currency, property prices became much more affordable, and indeed many (not only Russians and Ukrainians, but Germans, Poles, Czechs, and others) began taking up property in the city. To the extent that one could forget about the war, the pandemic, and the crumbling economy, things were normal. But even then, incidents occurred that brought the outside world tumbling in.
In June 2023, a young Russian man was at a beach in the south of the city with his girlfriend and father. It was not a typical sunny summer day, but overcast and hazy—unusual for Egypt in June. The man, twenty-three-year-old Vladimir Popov, was swimming alone near the shore, within sight of his father. Perhaps everything was fine just before, but when the world was introduced to Popov, it was in a gruesome video shot from a cellphone on land, as he struggled for his life. Something was attacking him from below, staining the water red. His body appears almost weightless against the force thrashing him. He breaks loose and shouts for his father, but within less than a minute it is over. His father cannot do anything but watch from shore as his son is dragged below.
In another video, forwarded many times on social media, we see the aftermath. In the chaotic footage is a tiger shark, a giant three-meter hulk with its mouth gaping wide open, laid on the sand with a large hook lodged into its nostril. The shark’s belly is bulged tight—pregnant perhaps, or full. A crowd of men surrounds the beached shark, clubbing it to death with a metal rod.
I was in Hong Kong when this happened, attending university. Hurghada is no stranger to shark attacks (just the previous year, two women—one Austrian and one Romanian—were killed by a mako shark) but there was something horribly gruesome about this incident that gripped me. There were the videos, and the horrific detail of the young man being so near to shore—near enough that his death was recorded from multiple angles, that a boat appeared on scene just seconds too late, that his father could see and hear his struggle—but doomed nonetheless. There was also the aftermath; sharks have previously attacked humans, but I had never seen a shark being lynched. There was something mob-like in the crowd of men. It reeked of revenge, of a breakdown in understanding, of a step backwards.
It was this confluence of factors that sent me searching for more information. My immediate search took me to Google Maps to locate where the incident had taken place. It had happened at Dream Beach, in front of a four-star resort called Elysees Hotel situated in a newer part of the city. Within hours of the incident, the resort and beach were flooded with dozens of five-star reviews, almost all of which have since been removed.
Maksym Ivanov: “Perfect place to eat raw russians. Slava Ukraini!” Two people had marked the review as helpful with a thumbs up.
Stepan Shaygas: “I recommend this hotel for Russians, I advise you to admire the underwater world more often…”
It was 3:36am Hong Kong time. Just four minutes before that, a person with a Cyrillic username had written: “Great shark show! The best hotel! Glory to Ukraine!”
III. Government
As news of Popov’s death spread in real time, Red Sea Governorate authorities ordered the shark’s capture. What appeared on video as a mob lynching was an orchestrated hunt. Sixteen fishermen, overseen by members of the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, dropped nets and baited hooks into the water. An hour later they had the shark. In one version of the story the shark was pregnant; in another, confirmed by the Institute, it had recently given birth.
The shark was transported to the Institute where it was immediately dissected. On a Tuesday morning ten months later, I was searching for a museum and stumbled upon the Institute by chance.
It was a searingly hot day. There was not a cloud in the sky, yet the sun cast a white, disorienting haze on the earth. I parked my car in what little shade I could find—a sliver of protection that covered only the first few inches of its hood—and got out.
The complex that housed the Hurghada Marine Museum was an assortment of small, single-story buildings sprinkled near the shore. Three of the buildings constituted the museum, while the rest belonged to the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries. There was no one in sight apart from a woman sitting on a chair by the steps of a building. She was having breakfast out of her purse and talking on the phone. When I approached, she smiled welcomingly and charged me a ticket. Behind her was the aquarium; she told me to have a look inside first, and then she’d show me the rest.
I entered the aquarium. An open courtyard in its center gave the impression of light, but when I turned into the corridor which housed the tanks I realized that the building itself was dark. The lights were all off. I searched unsuccessfully for a switch, and, not wanting to interrupt the woman’s breakfast once more, continued down the corridor hoping something might change. I could see the first few tanks by the light of the courtyard, but they were empty. As I walked further, the corridor became pitch black, and the floor became wet. A splash rang out beside me, as though a fish had leaped from its tank and flopped back in. I returned to the woman.
“Oh, the electricity must be out,” she said, folding her sandwiches back into a plastic bag inside her purse. She readjusted her hijab. “Come, let’s see the next building.”
The next building had windows, and though it was damp and warm, it was not dark. It was a small house a stone’s throw from the water. It had once been home to Hamed Gohar, an illustrious Egyptian oceanographer who was known across the Arabic-speaking world for his TV program, Sea World. Gohar was the first person to submit a Master of Science thesis to the Egyptian University (now Cairo University), and in the 1930s and 40s while Egypt was half a century under colonial rule, he stayed at this marine station and collected specimens from the sea. One of Gohar’s achievements was proving that the dugong (the ‘bride of the sea,’ or mermaid, in Arabic) was not locally extinct. It hadn’t been sighted in the Red Sea in a hundred years until Gohar re-discovered it. For this, Gohar has been likened to Darwin by the Egyptian Streets, but one look at him in his half-rimmed glasses and seashell-studded hat, his furry goatee and the rumors that he never married or ate fish, suggests instead the solitary zeal of Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Late in his career Gohar would say, “I’ve given practically all my life, not to one species or other, but rather to the sea itself.”
It was impossible not to compare, looking at the species Gohar collected eight decades earlier, his world with ours. The specimens spoke of abundance—but I knew that just outside the window was a different sea. It was warmer and emptier, and less wondrous. Entombed in glass, Gohar’s specimens felt eulogetic.
We entered the final building. A large, taxidermized manta ray hung from the wall, seven bullet holes dotting its torso and back. A black-and-white photograph of the dead ray, surrounded by smiling men, hung nearby.
There was one final exhibit. It was behind another door, inside a windowless room. The electricity hadn’t returned and so the door was propped open to let in light. Before I could register what I was seeing, the little light that found its way through was skewered and swallowed. Jagged teeth, a mouth—cavernous, gaping—faced you as you entered. In the room’s darkness there was still something of the sea, of primal fear. In the dampness, sweat evaporates slowly.
The hunt for the shark ended here. It was dissected in the aquarium building I had first entered, behind a locked door opposite the courtyard. Inside that building, pieces of Vladimir Popov—a leg, an arm—came out of its stomach. They probed the body further, searching for signs. What the government sought to prove was that something was wrong with this shark—some genetic mutation or biological malware that had caused it to attack. Faced with an alarmed public and frightened tourists, the government needed evidence that the sea was still safe.
There was something bizarre in this line of thinking. There was also something unsettling in the language of the exhibit’s text: Egypt and its affiliated agencies have taken immediate action by successfully hunting the responsible shark for the attack. And there was something strange in the way loyalties were revealed when the Red Sea was pitted against the fruit—the tourists, the money—its nature brings.
When the government found nothing, the shark was sewn back together and placed on display. I watched it for a while. I knelt, removed my camera from its bag, and lined up the photo. I left and returned several days later. The woman was still there, and the place was still empty. The electricity had returned, and under the glare of the fluorescent light the scene was entirely different. The shark had shriveled. Its skin, the sandpaper-like skin of a shark, had turned to paper-mâché. Its fake replacement eyes looked cheap, and the rim of its mouth was as though lined with lipstick. Its stripes were gone; its dorsal fin lopped to one side, deflated.