IFLICKED my fins and moved through the glittering water to the bridge of the sunken ship. Violet and scarlet fish moved lazily out of my way. I gripped the rail of the bridge: from a hole in it a silver guppy, the size and general appearance of a safety pin, looked out at me speculatively. The flow of bubbles from my breathing regulator fluttered silently to the surface of the sea, 20 metres above.
Down here, virtually nothing had changed since the merchant ship, Thistlegorm, was sunk in 1941 by German planes and settled at the bottom of the Red Sea. She had begun to turn into a coral reef, her decks and body encrusted with strange, waving growths.On the main deck, motorcycles were still chained in rows, the rubber of their tyres turned by half a century in the sea into something thick and hard as rock. I looked at my air gauge: it was time to return to the surface.
Out here in the Red Sea, Israeli dive boats are common even though the Sinai peninsular has long reverted to Egyptian control. The scuba-diving industry which the Israelis brought with them after their capture of Sinai in 1967 is still booming, but the Israelis are more cautious nowadays. When we came alongside some Egyptian fishing boats, the small Israeli flag we had been flying was taken down.
Not that anybody interferes with the diving industry. Its centre, Sharm el-Sheikh, is a long way from the areas where Islamic fundamentalists operate, and the inhabitants of Sinai are mostly Bedouin who have so far been untouched by religious extremism.
Tourism probably brings in more revenue in real terms to the Egyptian Government than anything else except subventions from the United States. The various fundamentalist groups, knowing this, have concentrated much of their effort on attacking tourists in Cairo, in the region around Assyut, and along the Nile.
The results have been spectacular. Not in terms of deaths, since no tourist has been killed in Egypt this year, but in the tailing off of the trade. At the Pyramids recently I counted only three buses in the car park where 30 or 40 would once have been jammed in. ''It is finished, my friend, finished,'' said the man in a shop near the attraction. He was trying to sell me the genuine perfume which Queen Nefertiti used on her wedding night with Tutankhamen.
''Until these fundamentalists give up, the tourists will not come back.'' He spent most of the rest of the conversation begging me not to identify him. Since there are about 30 shops around there which sell Queen Nefertiti's genuine perfume, he will probably be safe.