Leave the Nile behind and drive through streets clogged with honking traffic, past the crumbling belle époque façades of Cairo’s Downtown. Loop round raised highways that overlook the raw brick slums strung with washing lines and electricity cables. Pass the silent tomb-houses of the City of the Dead and continue down the road, lined with military compounds, to Suez. 

This route follows the progress of modern Egyptian history, from Khedive Ismail, who built Downtown at the end of the 19th century in emulation of Paris, to the nationalist monuments of Colonel Nasser, who ousted the king and British colonisers in a coup in 1952. It continues past the parade-viewing stand where Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated in 1981, and the presidential palace in which Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, resigned in the face of the Arab spring protests in 2011. Here, too, Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s only democratically elected president, was arrested after a year in office, as the army took back control. Another general, Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, removed his uniform and put on a suit to become president in 2014. 

Cairo has expanded rapidly over the past two decades. The highway is surrounded by new neighbourhoods, gleaming malls and gated communities of grand villas and grassy verges. Concrete skeletons of construction sites are emerging from the desert. Advertisements for fancy developments are illustrated with lush golf courses and sparkling swimming pools. “This is the story of Egypt,” said my friend at the wheel, who inherited an apartment in Downtown. “People move out of Cairo.” He explained that his wife wanted them to move to New Cairo, a satellite city to the east of the capital, but that he refused. “I think she wants to move because it’s a new place. Fancier, greener, better restaurants. It’s modern life.”

After driving 40km into the desert, we caught sight of the faint silhouette of a tall tower amid a cluster of shorter ones, shrouded in sand. President Sisi’s blandly handsome face, his eyes shielded with dictator-chic sunglasses, looked out from a billboard next to signs advertising a new capital for what he has called a “new republic”.