The souq was brimming with stalls that i had never seen before amongst the hundreds of small shops. Full of home made sweets, gooey cakes and electri pink icing statues. Like an oldfashiioned fairy tale sweetshop from Alice in Wonderland. I wander down the street trying not to collide with young men who have abandoned their spice stalls for the day to walk raound submerged under a menagery of inflateable animals.

Everywhere people are wearing or selling glitzy cone hats and the air of festivity is present even in the eyes of the ancient shoe polisher who's expressions usually vanish under the leathery parchment of his skin.

The preparations fill the whole day and it is only much later that i begin to sense the heighteneing of the moulid. From my hotel room i hear the murmer of a low rythmic beating. Gradually picking up intensity untill it reaches a reverbreating creshcendo. I fling myself to the balcony in time to witness the stream of entertainers, banners and children shaperoned by ladies swathed in blakc and proud father's dignified in galabayas and the desert headdress, kafaya.

The jovial party pauses at the end of the corniche for some time and it can still be heard from the felucca as we sail around the nubian islands at sunset. The strings of the rababa against the deep thumping of the duf and we listen as the prosession once again dies away into a distant whispher and watch the last glints of light fade behind the desert dunes of the west bank.

We lie back in the age old Felucca and weave amongst islands as egrets fly home to roost amongst the red silk flower trees. The Meuzzin calls the villagers to prayer in a particularly poignant lament from the minaret of the mosque on Elephantine Island.