SAFAGA, Egypt – The names of survivors of Friday’s ferry accident blared anonymously from the voice inside the police car, behind a line of riot police. Occasionally a shout of relief was heard from the lucky husband, brother, or friend, a heartfelt “Hamdul lellah,” thanks to God.

It was 9:30 a.m., more than 31 hours since the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 first took on water. And in that time period hundreds of men and women made pilgrimage to the port that was to receive a doomed ship of pilgrims, foreign workers, and tourists. At best 450 of the ferry’s 1,300 passengers are believed to have survived, leading the throngs gathered to hear the names from the megaphone to conduct a cruel process of elimination.

“I have to lie to my daughter. I don’t know what to tell her, they tell us nothing,” an electrical engineer, Mahmoud Yusef Mohammed, said. He is a stout man in a brown wool abaya that he wears to keep warm at night where he has slept with other future mourners. He drove 600 kilometers from Beni Swif to learn the whereabouts of his son-in-law, Ahmad Hasin Abdul Wahab, an accountant returning from Kuwait on a business trip.

Abdel Salem Mohammed Shu’eeb, an iron-worker from Giza, was looking for his sister Fatima, who was pregnant and was coming to Egypt to give birth. “They should have given us a place to stay, consolation, and readily available information,” he said.

By daybreak on Saturday, the state showed out in force, but not to comfort the mourners, inform them, or give them shelter, water, or the other amenities of grieving people. Rather the men in blue were sent to keep the grieving throngs from the hospital, the port, and the hotels that lined the stretch of highway the mourners now occupied. President Mubarak was due to arrive.

Before he did, clashes between the crowds and security had already started. About 100 men started shouting and throwing rocks at the double line of police guarding the entrance to the ferry. “Let us in,” one man shouted. “We have a right to know.”

The security forces did not budge. They held green or blue cords of rope no more than 18 inches long. Some stood holding the rope to form a line. Others used the cords of rope in a loop to beat back the crowd. At the entrance of the port, better equipped security men, wearing helmets with plastic visors, used bamboo sticks to beat back the families of the victims. The street clash seemed out of place for the setting of this sleepy resort city and port. In the brief melee, a smiling sun and mermaid in a nearby relief across the highway seemed to watch with a calmness of things rendered in stone.

There is a joke here about the riot police, also known as the central security forces or al Amn al Markazy: An officer asks a room full of recruits to separate into groups based on their literacy. Those who cannot read or write go to the right side of the room; those who can, go to the left side. Those remaining in the center, who did not understand the question, become the riot police. This joke seemed appropriate when one officer the next day insisted that the presence of his men was for the security of the mourners.

A day after the fighting, the grieving crowd gathered again before the entrance of the port. This time the man in the police car was reading the names of the dead. And the men stood in silence, some of them crying.