In 1860, nowhere on maps was newly minted Būr Saʿīd (Port Said) to be found. The town, already teeming with life, lay on the northern Egyptian shore. Founded in 1859 as the first worksite run by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, it had become a “small city” inhabited by 4,000 Egyptian and European migrant laborers in just one year’s time. While the history of Egypt’s urbanization has been written from the standpoint of the nineteenth-century growth of Cairo and Alexandria, conceived as exclusive sites of historical change, such insulating approach has obscured the significance of transformations outside of these two cities. Non-existing before 1859, Port Said grew quickly and became a crucial node for mobility of various kinds during the first decades of its existence. My research examines Port Said’s dual character as both a port connected to other ports globally and as an urban center embedded on the land. It also situates Port Said into the context of the Suez Canal uncoiling south of it. It approaches this town and this waterway as part and parcel of the same system of mobility. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, Port Said emerged as both an inlet and an egress for streams of unregulated people and goods, moving about the Mediterranean, the Canal, and beyond. Stowaways from Mediterranean and Red sea ports, for example, re-surfaced from steamship steerage crannies in Port Said, their sometimes unintended final destination. Custom-free, or contraband, or stolen stuff also circulated in and out of the Canal area in ways that went unsupervised. My work demonstrates that, while a number of surveillance measures (Customs, police, religious institutions) came to be established at Port Said, the Canal’s intended checkpoint, undocumented people and goods could still enter and exit with ease. Thus, they transformed Port Said into the living contradiction of turn-of-the-century Mediterranean mobility. In 1906, a standard-gauge railway connected the seemingly isolated Port Said to the rest of Egypt, changing the licit and illicit mobility patterns that had woven the port-city and the Canal together in the previous fifty years.