When the hacker tourist has tired of contemplating the profound significance of intersections (which, frankly, doesn't take very long) he must turn his attention to - you guessed it - cable routes. This turns out to be a much richer vein.

30° 58.319' N, 29° 49.531' EAlexandria Tollbooth, the Desert Road, Sahara Desert, Egypt

As we speed across the Saharan night, the topic of conversation turns to Hong Kong. Our Egyptian driver, relaxed and content after stopping at a roadside rest area for a hubbly-bubbly session (smoking sweetened tobacco in a Middle Eastern bong), smacks the steering wheel gleefully. "Ha, ha, ha!" he roars. "Miserable Hong Kong people!"

Alexandria and Cairo are joined by two separate, roughly parallel highways called the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. The latter runs through cultivated parts of the Nile Delta. The Desert Road is a rather new, four-lane highway with a tollbooth at each end - tollbooths in the middle not being necessary, because if you get off in the middle you will die. It is lined for its entire length with billboards advertising tires, sunglasses, tires, tires, tires, bottled water, sunglasses, tires, and tires.

Perhaps because it is supported by tolls, the Desert Highway is a first-rate road all the way. This means not merely that the pavement is good but also that it has a system of ducts and manholes buried under its median strip, so that anyone wishing to run a cable from one end of the highway to the other - tollbooth to tollbooth - need only obtain a "permit" and ream out the ducts a little. Or at least that's what the Egyptians say. The Lan Tao Island crowd, who are quite discriminating when it comes to ducts and who share an abhorrence of all things Egyptian, claim that cheap PVC pipe was used and that the whole system is a tangled mess.

They would both agree, however, that beyond the tollbooths the duct situation is worse. The Alexandria Tollbooth is some 37 kilometers outside of the city center; you get there by driving along a free highway that has no ducts at all.

This problem is being remedied by FLAG, which has struck a deal with ARENTO (Arab Republic of Egypt National Telecommunications Organization - the PTT) that is roughly analogous to the one it made with the Communications Authority of Thailand. FLAG has no choice but to go overland across Egypt, just as in Thailand. The reasons for doing so here are entirely different, though.

By a freak of geography and global politics, Egypt possesses the same sort of choke point on Europe-to-Asia telecommunications as the Suez canal gives it in the shipping industry. Anyone who wants to run a cable from Europe to East Asia has severely limited choices. You can go south around Africa, but it's much too far. You can go overland across all of Russia, as U S West has recently talked about doing, but if even a 170-kilometers terrestrial route across Thailand gets your customers fumbling for their smelling salts, what will they say about one all the way across Russia? You could attempt a shorter terrestrial route from the Levant to the Indian Ocean, but given the countries it would have to pass through (Lebanon and Iraq, to name two), it would have about as much chance of survival as a strand of gossamer stretched across a kick-boxing ring. And you can't lay a cable down the Suez Canal, partly because it would catch hell from anchors and dredgers, and partly because cable-laying ships move very slowly and would create an enormous traffic jam.

The only solution that is even remotely acceptable is to land the cable on Egypt's Mediterranean coast (which in practice means either Alexandria or Port Said) and then go overland to Suez, where the canal joins the Gulf of Suez, which in turn joins the Red Sea. The Red Sea is so shallow and so heavily trafficked, by the way, that all cables running through it must be plowed into the seafloor, which is a hassle, but obviously preferable to running a terrestrial route through the likes of Sudan and Somalia, which border it.

In keeping with its practice of running two parallel routes on terrestrial sections, FLAG is landing at both Alexandria and Port Said. From these cities the cables converge on Suez. Alexandria is far more important than Port Said as a cable nexus for the simple reason that it is at the westernmost extreme of the Nile Delta, so you can reach it from Europe without having to contend with the Nile. European cables running to Port Said, by contrast, must pass across the mouths of the Nile, where they are subjected to currents.

Engineer Mustafa Musalam, general manager of transmission for ARENTO's Alexandria office, is a stocky, affable, silver-haired gent. Egypt is one of those places where Engineer is used as a title, like Doctor or Professor, and Engineer Musalam bears the title well. In his personality and bearing he has at least as much in common with other highly competent engineers around the world as he does with other Egyptians. In defiance of ARENTO rules, he drives himself around in his own vehicle, a tiny, beat-up, but perfectly functional subcompact. An engineer of his stature is supposed to be chauffeured around in a company car. Most Egyptian service-industry professionals are masters at laying passive-aggressive head trips on their employers. Half the time, when you compensate them, they make it clear that you have embarrassed them, and yourself, by grossly overdoing it - you have just gotten it totally wrong, really pissed down your leg, and placed them in a terribly awkward situation. The other half of the time, you have insulted them by being miserly. You never get it right. But Engineer Musalam, a logical and practical-minded sort, cannot abide the idea of a driver spending his entire day, every day, sitting in a car waiting for the boss to go somewhere. So he eventually threw up his hands and unleashed his driver on the job market.

Charitably, Engineer Musalam takes the view that the completion of the Aswøan High Dam tamed the Nile's current to the point where no one need worry about running cables to Port Said anymore. FLAG's surveyors obviously agree with him, because they chose Port Said as one of their landing points. On the other hand, FLAG's archenemy, SEA-ME-WE 3, will land only at Alexandria, because France Telecom's engineers refuse to lay cable across the Nile. SEA-ME-WE 3's redundant routes will run, instead, along the Desert Road and the Agricultural Road. Bandwidth buyers trying to choose between the two cables can presumably look forward to lurid sales presentations from FLAG marketers detailing the insane recklessness of SEA-ME-WE 3's approach, and vice versa.

At the dirt-and-duct level, the operation in Egypt is much like the one in Thailand. The work is being done by Consolidated Contractors, which is a fairly interesting multinational contracting firm that is based and funded in the Middle East but works all over the globe. Here it is laying six 100-mm ducts (10 inside Alexandria proper) as compared with only two in Thailand. These ducts are all PVC pipe, but FLAG's duct is made of a higher grade of PVC than the others - even than President Mubarak's duct.

That's right - in a nicely Pharaonic touch, one of the six ducts going into the ground here is the sole property of President Hosni Mubarak, or (presumably) whoever succeeds him as head of state. It is hard to envision why a head of state would want or need his own private tube full of air running underneath the Sahara. The obvious guess is that the duct might be used to create a secure communications system, independent of the civilian and military systems (the Egyptian military will own one of the six ducts, and ARENTO will own three). This, in and of itself, says something about the relationship between the military and the government in Egypt. It is hardly surprising when you consider that Mubarak's predecessor was murdered by the military during a parade.