Less than 24 hours after the three powerful bomb blasts killed scores of people , those on the Dahab esplanade were working hard to act normal. Waiters at the "Al Capone," a seaside restaurant, were busy repairing wooden sunscreens. Even the cushioned benches at the bar are back where they are supposed to be. Other workers are patching up the battered bridge above the Dahab riverbed nearby. The lethal bombs that exploded in this popular tourist spot have left hardly any traces -- at least not at first sight.

Take a closer look and you'll discover blood on the esplanade. It's dried in the cracks, turning brown in the sunshine. The corner is strewn with broken glass from shattered windows and from the fish display in the popular restaurant. The blow from the explosion catapulted it through the street, seriously injuring dozens of people. Most of the victims of the attack died inside the restaurant.

Peace, non-violence and dollars

The Egyptian government is struggling feverishly to restore a normality that cannot but appear artificial. The police and the fire department hosed of the three seaside spots in only 12 hours, thereby eliminating most of the evidence that could have provided clues about the bombers. All reminders of the lethal terror attack on the Sinai peninsula have to disappear, so that the world will stop associating Egypt and Dahab with death as quickly as possible. The country is simply too dependent on tourist dollars.

But on Wednesday new attacks struck the Sinai, shaking the government imposed calm after two suicide bombers killed themselves but caused no other casualties near the main base of the multinational peacekeeping force close to the Gaza border. And normality has become something very abstract for those who witnessed the attacks in Dahab anyway.

Peace and non-violence used to be something like a mantra for the town -- not just because of the omnipresent peace symbols, the Bob Marley songs blaring from loudspeakers everywhere, and the Batik cloth for sale at many a street corner. For ten years, the town on the Red Sea was a magnet for backpackers and latter-day hippies, an alternative to Hurghada and Sharm el-Sheikh, centers of mass tourism, and a place to roll joints, beat on drums and flirt. A few seconds were enough to shatter the peace of this  hedonist community. The roughly 1,000 foreigners who live in Dahab the year round, most of them divers or hoteliers, are not just fearing for their own safety -- their whole livelihoods are at stake. "We moved here because we wanted to consciously create a different life for ourselves," said 40-year-old Andrea, who has been financing her life on the beach by designing bikinis for the past four years, a kind of neo-hippie with a cell phone dangling around her neck.

The young German diver Andreas Tischer was less than ten meters (33 feet) away from the "Al Capone" when the first bomb was detonated -- by remote control, presumably. He too has been living in Dahab for years. If there hadn't been a truck between Andreas and the restaurant, he would probably be dead now. He explained at first he thought a gas tank had exploded. Then there was another explosion. For a minute everything stood still, he said. People stared blankly, as if everything were happening in slow motion. Then everyone ran away from the beach as quickly as they could.

Screams and blood

Andreas shared his experience with hundreds of other eyewitnesses who were strolling through Dahab in the early evening, around 7:15 pm on Monday. The same images have etched themselves into their souls. "A huge crowd of people came running towards me, screaming and bleeding," Tischer said. When he ran into the open restaurant in order to see if there was anything he could do to help, he discovered corpses with severed limbs. Survivors lay between them, looking for injuries on each other's bodies.

The only known German victim, Marcel from Tübingen, died somewhere in here. The ten-year-old was having dinner with his mother Susanne and her boyfriend when the first bomb exploded. Shrapnel and broken glass killed him instantly. Susanne and her boyfriend were mildly injured. The child died before their eyes. They were taken to hospital in a state of shock. Marcel's mother was flown back to Stuttgart the same Tuesday.

It was a matter of chance who died and who survived in Dahab. Some people in the "Al Capone" got away with a few bruises because they happened to be bending over or because they were protected by a sofa backrest. Others were hurled into the sea by the pressure from the explosion. The bomb exploded directly next to the restaurant's employee touting its menu.