John Kernick (2)

Tourist-driven: Beachside tobacco hookahs, left, and Nasser Hameid's friend and driver, Abid Farej.

Inside an airy stucco house, Rotondi is making lunch—pasta for me, raw vegetables for himself. ("REMEMBER," he had e-mailed me, "COOKED FOOD IS POISON!") He moves with a diver's liquid presence, equal parts pranayama yoga and hydrodynamic habit. After the takeover, he began growing dreadlocks; five months later, they are still baby dreads, but as his exile lengthens, so do the tendrils. He shaved his temples for a big court appearance—"girding for battle," he says—and so now he sometimes comes across as the world's first Arabic-speaking cucumber-eating Pawnee-brave-on-the-warpath Rasta-Brahmin. Walid joins us, too, a tall Egyptian diver in beachwear, and over lunch the partners begin the byzantine story of their expulsion.

Club Red's was an unlikely alliance—a Bostonian, an Egyptian, and five Bedouin. A former policeman, Walid had been in business with Nasser Hameid, but after a "falling out," as Rotondi puts it, he signed on with the American in the Club Red deal. (There is little love lost between settled Egyptians like Walid and the formerly nomadic Bedouin: The Bedouin are "dirty and ignorant," several Egyptians assured me; Egyptians are "dumb," a few Bedouin told me, especially when compared to Israelis.) For four years the deal worked; Rotondi paid the rent by sharing profits with the Hameids. Then, in February 1999, he expanded, leasing nine more buildings for 50,000 Egyptian pounds per month—almost $15,000. Like the original building, these had been part of one of Dahab's many cheap camps, and Rotondi embarked on a series of upgrades for which he believed the brothers would reimburse him. He expected to raise prices for the improved club but ended up being undercut by Dahab's many cheaper accommodations. In January, the club's rent went unpaid, and from there the story devolves into a sandstorm of accusation. "In Dahab," Rotondi says heatedly, "it's not the cream that floats to the top—it's the shit."

But Club Red isn't the first scuba shop Rotondi has lost: By his own admission, he was pushed out of both of the previous shops he managed by his (Western) partners. And since the Club Red takeover, he almost lost his only remaining business, a small scuba school called the Dive Zone, when the landlord threatened to take it back. This time, Walid convinced some members of the Egyptian National Wrestling Team to ride up from Sharm el-Sheikh with him in a van. ("Friends of mine," he explains.) He paraded them around the Dive Zone, and the argument was settled without the need for invasions or full nelsons.

Some anti-Bedouin Egyptian businessmen think Rotondi was in the wrong financially, but not morally. "Rod still owes me one thousand dollars," claims Mr. Zido, owner of the Ghazala Supermarket, Dahab's largest grocery store. But in the next breath he disparages the Hameids in typically Egyptian terms as "rich Bedouin, spoiled, greedy. Rod is not a bad man," he continues. "He is a good man. The people, they all like him." (Rotondi asserts that he is settling his accounts with Mr. Zido on a month-to-month basis). Another Egyptian, a dive master who knows Rotondi "from the beach," says, "What happened to Rod, it's common here. It's Egypt." He shakes his head angrily. "Nasser Hameid is a fucking asshole."

Of course, every territorial conflict in the Sinai is rooted in ancient enmities, even one over a scuba shop. After millennia of land disputes, the Bedouin are intensely sensitive about their land, and their honor. Reached on his cell phone, Nasser Hameid immediately wails that Rod "fucked my feelings" and argues that he still owes him hundreds of thousands of Egyptian pounds for back rent, insurance, electricity, and telephone bills (which, Rotondi maintains, bank records show he has paid in full). But finances are secondary: Again and again Hameid returns to the word "promise."

"He's somebody who promised somebody something," Hameid says, sounding at times on the verge of tears, "and if he change that promise, he is not an OK person. This is the way. This is my business, this is my heart, and he eat from it. This is all family, all Bedouin here, and he make money from it."

Born in the desert, Nasser Hameid can sound as romantic as any foreign interloper when he idealizes the life of the Mezzeineh. "The Bedouin has a nice life," he explains, "a good heart, never he think to give anybody shit." And what's more, he says, the Bedouin harbor no antipathy toward Westerners. "Here in Dahab," he says, "you don't have any problem with foreigners." The real damage, according to him, has been to his family's reputation: "Inshallah I can fix my life, but Rod hurt me too much, I trusted him too much, and I got a lot of shit from people. I promised them money and I didn't pay them because Rod didn't pay me. So what can I do?"

So far the Egyptian courts have consistently upheld Rotondi's claims to Club Red. But Walid cautions me over the lunch table that the real law in Egypt is that of influence, of powerful wastas who broker deals over tiny cups of Turkish coffee. Mohammed, the eldest Hameid brother, sits in Dahab's chamber of commerce, and the family has the town's biggest wasta on their side: Sheikh Salem, the nine-fingered Mezzeineh ancestral leader who sits on the city council. Even Dahab's white-suited tourist police, Walid claims, answer to the sheikh. He mutters a political aphorism in Arabic, which Rotondi translates: "If you have a strong back, then no one will attack you from the front."

Meanwhile, Rotondi tries to maintain a yogic calm. After his "living" lunch of greens, he shows me a rusted shepherd's flute that he found in a Bedouin oasis a few days before. He toots out a few notes, more sincere and hopeful than competent. "If I clean it," he says with a wry smile, "maybe a genie will come out and I'll get Club Red back."