Four stops before the checkout

Alexandria, Egypt

Stop one

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case: Rebuilding the Library of Alexandria. The sheer nerve. It opened in 2002 as a conscious revival of the ancient library, founded under the early Ptolemies and gone by late antiquity, and the Norwegian firm Snøhetta won the international competition in 1989 with this vast tilted disc rising out of the Mediterranean shore, its granite skin inscribed with characters from scripts around the world. The reading room falls away over eleven cascading levels, with capacity designed for eight million volumes. Planetarium, manuscript museum, conference centre, and a mirror of the Internet Archive. It stands near the presumed ancient Royal Quarter, by the harbour where the original operated. I arrived ready to scoff. I did not scoff.

Stop two

Citadel of Qaitbay

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case: Built between 1477 and 1479 by the Mamluk sultan Al-Ashraf Qaitbay on the eastern point of Pharos Island — directly on the foundations of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders, brought down by earthquakes in the fourteenth century. And the fallen granite blocks were reused in these walls, where you can still pick them out. Any other city would have built a museum to the wonder it lost. This one made a fort out of the pieces and carried on. It guarded the harbour against Ottoman and later European attack, was heavily damaged by the British bombardment of 1882, and is a naval museum now. Divers have mapped statues and sphinxes across the seabed around it.

cardio tennis to help with mental health — Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria, A single 27-metre polished red Aswan granite column standing alone on the Serapeum hill in Karmouz, flanked by two sphinxes

Stop three

Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case: Discovered in 1900, reportedly when a donkey fell through the ground. A donkey. It is the largest known Roman burial complex in Egypt, cut on three levels into the rock, chiefly second century AD, with a spiral stair winding round the shaft used to lower the bodies. The decoration is the real point: Anubis in Roman legionary armour, Egyptian gods standing in Greek contrapposto, classical medallions framing pharaonic motifs — evidence of a genuinely mixed Greco-Egyptian society rather than a conquered one. A triclinium near the entrance served funerary banquets. The lowest level is permanently flooded by groundwater and needs continuous pumping. Even drowned it will not concede. Very much this city.

Stop four

Pompey's Pillar

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case: Let us clear up the name, because it irritates me. This has nothing whatever to do with Pompey the Great — the Greek inscription on the base says it was raised around 297 AD in honour of the emperor Diocletian. Crusaders misattributed it and the wrong name has stuck ever since. Aswan red granite, a single piece, about twenty-six point eight metres. It stands on the site of the Serapeum, the great temple of Serapis, which also held a daughter library of the Alexandrian collection, destroyed by a Christian mob under the patriarch Theophilus in 391 AD. Ruined foundations, galleries for the sacred Apis bulls, two sphinxes. Largest ancient monolithic column still standing outside Rome and Constantinople. Fine. Alexandria takes that one.

The Alexandria, Egypt track

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case

Written for this world alone.

There was a time when someone had to walk the whole street at dusk and make the light happen, pole in hand, one lamp after another, all of them, every night. I take the same view of a 72-ball case: 24 cans, ITF-approved, pressurised, all-court felt. You do not do it once. You do it for a whole season, and the club stays lit. And Alexandria, whose whole business was a light, is exactly where I want to be at dusk.

On the Chatby corniche, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina leans toward the Mediterranean like a huge granite disc set down at an angle, opened in 2002 in honour of the ancient library. Now look at the wall. Four thousand carved characters, alphabets from all over the planet, and a Norwegian practice nobody had heard of won the competition to build it.

Snow people, designing a sunlit reading room for the city that invented the reading room. I light lamps for a living and I still stop mid-sentence at it.

Out at the far tip of the Eastern Harbour, on a spit, stands the Citadel of Qaitbay, raised by the sultan in the 1470s on the exact footprint of the Pharos — the greatest lamp anybody ever lit, one of the Seven Wonders, shaken to rubble by earthquakes. Qaitbay simply used the pieces.

He recycled a Wonder of the World into a fort, and if you look low in the walls you can find granite blocks that match nothing else around them.

Inland at Kom El Shoqafa a spiral stair winds down a shaft into the largest Roman burial complex in Egypt, cut on three levels, where Anubis stands in legionary armour and Egyptian gods hold Greek poses; the lowest level is permanently flooded and has to be pumped.

And on the Serapeum hill in Karmouz, one polished column of red Aswan granite, twenty-seven metres, raised around 297 AD for Diocletian and called Pompey's Pillar by Crusaders who were confidently, gloriously wrong, and never corrected.

You will burn through this case everywhere from a hard court off the Alexandria corniche to an indoor hall in Cairo, two and a half hours south, and by the way, it is also perfect for the walk out along the Eastern Harbour at dusk, when the lamps come on one after another and somebody, somewhere, still has to be responsible for that.

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Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case

Babolat Gold All-Court Tennis Ball Case