More than 120 coral islands lie off Massawa in Eritrea's Red Sea, and only three of them have anybody living on them. What they lack is fresh water. That shortage is written into the largest. On Dahlak Kebir, cisterns were cut down into the coral rock to hold whatever rain arrives, and beside them stands a medieval town. Its basalt gravestones carry the names of the sultans who ruled the archipelago, cut in angular Kufic script. The earliest go back to the tenth century, and much of what is known about that dynasty is known only because these stones survived. The reefs around them were fished for pearls from Roman times — dangerous breath-hold work, much of it once forced on enslaved divers, some of them children.
Almost nobody dives here now. The coral is unbroken and the fish are unbothered. Green turtles graze the seagrass in the shallows and hawksbills work the coral heads, and you can anchor off an empty island and wade in from sand nobody has walked on that week. Wooden boats thread you between the islets, each ringed by its own pale sandbar, and no two crossings look the same as the tides cover and uncover the reef flats. Off Nokra the rusting hulls of a Soviet naval base lie half-sunk where they were left in 1991 — a station that repaired submarines far from home waters — and coral has begun growing over the wreckage. A government permit and a hired boat from Massawa are the only way you reach any of it. In summer the low sand of Mojeidi vanishes under nesting terns, and the noise of the colony reaches you across the water long before the island does. One bird out there nests underground. The crab plover digs a burrow in the sand and lays its single white egg down in the dark, behaviour first found on these islands in 1858 — and no other wader in the world does it.