Ismailia mangoes have a reputation in Egypt that borders on religion. The sandy soil, the canal water and the dry heat make fruit with a perfume you can smell from the road. For us it is also the most intense week of the year, when the plant runs twenty hours a day. This is what it looked like.

Monday — Zebda first

Zebda is the early variety: fibreless, deep orange, very sweet. Picking starts at 5 a.m. with long poles and canvas bags. Fruit comes to the shed in shallow crates and is graded by hand. Anything with sap burn is set aside for purée.

Tuesday — the cutting line

Mango is peeled and cut by people, not machines; nobody has built a machine that respects the stone. Forty people on two lines cut about six tonnes of chunks in a shift. Every board is sanitised every hour. Cut pieces reach the tunnel within twenty minutes.

Wednesday — the heat

Forty-two degrees by noon. We stop picking at ten. Fruit picked in the afternoon heat arrives soft and has a shorter window before it must be cut. The orchard rests; the plant catches up.

You do not schedule a mango. You listen to it and move fast when it tells you.

Thursday & Friday — Keitt comes in

Keitt is the late, large variety with firm flesh — ideal for chunks that hold their shape in a fruit salad. Larger fruit, higher yield, easier on the cutters. The tunnel runs continuously and the cold store fills a bay a day.

Saturday — sampling

The lab pulls samples from every lot: Brix, colour against a card, piece-size sieve, micro. Nothing ships before the results return.

Sunday — the first container

• Twenty pallets of 10 kg Keitt chunks, bound for the Gulf.
• Pulp temperature at stuffing: −21 °C.
• From tree to carton, average: 6 h 40 min.

Then it starts again. The season runs until early October, and by the end of it every one of us can peel a mango in the dark.