The monument to the unknown soldier points into the unknown
The Egyptian revolution began in Suez, but as James Naughtie discovers, the city is still coming to terms with its recent rebellious past.
A monument to the Unknown Soldier stands on the waterfront at Suez, the warrior gazing across to the canal.
It was there that I met the brother of the first demonstrator to die in January, on what has become known here as the Day of Revolution.
He spoke of the crowd that gathered round the morgue where his brother lay, and how news spread that the authorities were refusing to release his body. "There were 400. Then 4,000. Then 8,000, 12,000. Soon the whole city."
That indeed is how it must have felt, as if a tidal wave had sprung up from nowhere, a tsunami of rage. It is a good place in which to remind yourself of the origins of the most important episode in what has become known as the Arab Spring.
The town honours the "martyrs of the revolution"
The season of upheavals has two obvious characteristics. The first is that the countries involved are quite different: it is rather hard to compare Tunisia with Yemen, except to say that they're both in the middle east and have a recent history of brutal autocracy.
But the second is that they have been engulfed by a common surge of energy. A deep well of frustration has turned into a gusher.
In Suez, you realize how powerful the moment was. On that first day, when a small number of demonstrators were killed by police who appeared panic-stricken, the power of the state evaporated.
As someone who saw it all put it to us: "By the end of the day there was no authority left, no government, in the whole city of Suez."
They burned down the first of the 99 police stations across Egypt that were sacked by protesters in that first heady rush of revolution, and within a day or two many of those who were in the vanguard of the uprising discovered that they were able to make contact with sympathisers across the country.
That police station stands as a monument to the uprising - inhabited only by rats, a shell with no windows or doors and pieces of rubble in the rooms where, so the locals say, the beatings were done.
The vast crowds in Tahrir Square in Cairo sprang from the same source, and the revolution was unstoppable.
Two weeks after the first throng filled that square, President Mubarak was gone. A last crack of the whip, a bizarre armed camel charge through the square, and even he knew that the game was up.
People were surprised, unbelieving, but knew on the instant that there was no going back.
The police station destroyed by the crowds on the first day of the protests
That is not to say that lives in Suez have been transformed. It is still desperately poor - dusty streets filled with people who scrape a living as best they can, despite living alongside the canal that brings considerable wealth to Egypt - and there is a great deal of frustration.
I spoke to the widow of one of the men killed on the first day, walking home from the mosque and caught in police fire because he happened to be in the wrong place and the wrong time. She's been left with five children, without a breadwinner. Had good come from all this?
"What good?" she said, in Arabic. "Tell me. There is nothing that has been changed." Her eyes were full of tears.
It was an important, and moving, piece of testimony. This is a change, maybe an age of optimism for many people, but not yet a transformation in the quality of life.
Just think of the uncertainties. Should the Egyptian elections go ahead in September, although the post-revolutionary political parties have not had time to organise themselves? And elsewhere, what happens if Yemen blows up, if they take to the streets in Bahrain when the state of emergency is lifted on Wednesday, if Syria sinks into chaos?
The regular demonstration in support of democracy outside a Suez mosque
But Suez makes the point. There is no going back. No doubt there are some people in Egypt who think, privately, that things were rather easier when Hosni Mubarak held sway; but they are few.
They look ahead to the day when they can live without fear. That day hasn't dawned yet - there's nervousness about how politics develops, a good deal of chaos in public services, alarm at outbreaks of lawlessness and worries about economic progress - but there is a settled conviction in this society that it will come.
That's the difference. It is the story you hear from people, especially the young, who are the majority in so many Arab countries: that this is a journey fuelled by enough hope to make the difficulties seem worthwhile.
Six months ago, young Egyptians did not have that sense of optimism. One woman with whom I worked over the weekend told me that she had cherished the hope that her grandchildren would live in a democracy, and never imagined it would happen to her.
No-one can pretend that for the people of Suez there has been a transformation in their lives; there hasn't. Nor that states across the middle east are going to blossom easily into placid societies; they aren't.
But anyone who tries to deny the power of the Arab Spring will find that, in the streets and it every home, it has taken hold.
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