"Water, water, everywhere,/ nor any drop to drink..." lamented the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's famous poem. The sea, too, can be a desert, with its vast, flat, empty surface sparkling and bare under the sun. And so it felt, driving 250 kilometers south from Hurghada toward Marsa Alam along the Red Sea coast. The Great Eastern Desert to the right of us and the Red Sea desert to the left of us and the long black line of the road ahead.

"Wow," I said to Anna, "I didn't expect this."

"I thought you would be shocked," she replied. "It's not at all like the tropical islands we're used to."

The unexpected desolation was accentuated by dozens of unfinished hotel construction projects scattered along the roadside. Bare concrete block walls, dusty courtyards, and a few frazzled palm trees seemed to be the extent of more than half of the projects waiting, unfinished, for a brighter day.

We booked at the Oasis Dive Resort just north of Marsa Alam. It sits on a bare rocky cliff overlooking the beach, the simple buildings done in traditional village architecture befitting the environment. A cluster of palm trees and aloes, and a small grove of stunted olive trees in the wadi running through the property help to create the feeling of an oasis in the desert. On the beach side, a pier juts out into the sea, reaching the dark line where bright shallow water suddenly turns dark and deep.

All activities at the Oasis turn around the dive shop. Racks of gear and shelves of books and detailed maps of local dive sites all over the wall confirm that this is a serious and well-organized operation, part of the Werner Lau system that extends through the Maldives and on to Bali. Although boat diving is offered, we opted for shore diving. It's simple and easy, and you don't get mal de mer. A fifteen to thirty minute minivan ride gets you to one of the many little bays that line the coast - marsa means bay. You gear up on the shore, wade in, and off you go.

Diving the Red Sea is different from other oceans. Reefs run the entire length of the coast, but the bays are shallow, making buoyancy control challenging, and the Red Sea is about 15% saltier than most oceans, so we had to add about 3 kilos of weight over what we would normally carry.

The extra weight adds a further dimension to the already strenuous task of walking down to the water from where you gear up on the beach. Tank, weights, buoyancy control vest, fins, mask and snorkel, camera; we struggled along feeling like astronauts, wearing all our gear down to the water's edge. Once we were under water, the dives were bliss. Because the bays are so shallow, 70 minute dives are common. Free nitrox at the Oasis makes long dives even easier and less fatiguing.

The typical site is a bay with seagrass beds in the middle and coral gardens and walls on both sides. A common dive plan is to head out into the seagrass beds at first, where most life is encountered only 6 to 10 meters down, to go looking for turtles and rays and guitar sharks, and also for It, the creature whose name must not be said, or you will never see it. Dugongs were once common in these bays, but their numbers have greatly reduced recently as tourism grows. Giant sea turtles more than a meter long, however, can be found grazing in herds like cows in the seagrass beds. We never did see It.

After 20 minutes floating over the seagrass, we would head to the north shore coral gardens, which are generally richer than those on the south side of the bays. There is a great variety of hard and soft corals, reef fish of all kinds, lion fish, scorpion and crocodile fish, as well as morays and octopi, cuttlefish and squid. The sea floor drops fairly rapidly toward the mouth of the bays, providing richly colorful walls to explore for down to 20 meters and more. Going out fairly deep, but rising up to 10 meters or less on the return extends dive time and gives you a chance to find some of the Red Sea's odder creatures.

On one such return, at Marsa Egla, I saw Anna hanging about 5 meters from the bottom a little off the wall, staring intently at the sea floor. She looked over at me, and pointed down at something. Henry, who had buddied with us that day, and I drifted over to see what she had found. Below us, something that looked like a rock was crawling across the sand among the coral heads. We all went down to take a closer look. It was hard to say what it was. It clawed slowly across the sand on insect-like black legs, and was more perfectly camouflaged than a scorpion fish. It was difficult to spot its eyes, or even to determine whether it was a fish. Henry took several photos, looking back up at me in amazement between shots as if to say, "What is this thing?"

We puzzled over it after the dive on the way back to the Oasis. I recalled having read about some kind of fish that crawls in the Red Sea. When we got back, I asked Roland, one of the divemasters, what it could be.

"Oh, that's a Red Sea Walkman," he replied at once, "very funny looking fish, and as toxic as a scorpion. It's sometimes called a devil fish. Nasty fellow, don't mess with him!"

Henry grinned. "Is that by Sony?" he asked.

But Roland was serious, and so it was. Anna had found a Red Sea Walkman (Inimicus filamentosus). That was the highlight of a series of very excellent dives, with a wonderful variety of marine creatures. The best dive site was Abu Dabab, where a herd of sea turtles grazed the sea grass beds, octopi were hiding among the corals, a cuttlefish sat tranquilly on the sand, and a squadron of squid wheeled with perfect symmetry to eye us as we passed below. Roland gently scratched an octopus between the eyes as it sat on a coral head trying to look like a rock. He was doing a pretty good imitation, but each time Roland would scratch him, he would recoil slightly and turn from mottled black and brown to pure white. He stayed put for several scratches, and we left him there when we sailed on.

Be warned, however. Even Marsa Alam is rapidly becoming overcrowded like the Red Sea dive sites further north. At one point, returning from our last dive at Abu Dabab, where we had set out almost at sunrise, we ran into a crowd of about fifteen divers coming toward us around a point. Looking up, the sea was frothy with a score of floundering snorkelers. Before long, even It will be only a memory of quieter times, so plan your visit soon.