One year after the Arab Spring, SPIEGEL correspondent Alexander Smoltczyk set out on a journey through the Maghreb to assess the changes the region has undergone. On the third and final leg of his journey through North Africa, he ends in Cairo, where the revolution is still underway.

On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young man in rural Tunisia, poured gasoline on himself -- and ignited an entire region. One by one, the people of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya toppled their rulers. One year after Bouazizi's self-immolation, much has changed in the Maghreb. But a lot has remained the same. In places where secular rulers prevailed for decades, Islamists are now trying to seize the reins of power. And many people there are just as poor and hopeless as they were before the revolutions.

This is the third article in a series by SPIEGEL correspondent Alexander Smoltczyk as he travels along the Transmaghrébine highway from Morocco to Egypt together with a photographer. On the third leg of his journey, he travels from the Libyan border, through Alexandria and on to Cairo, where he finds violence flaring up on the streets once again. Be sure to also read the frist and second parts of the series.

The trip ends the way it began: with shots, flames, barricades and deaths. The journey of more than 5,000 kilometers (2,272 miles), through the landscape of revolutions, was to end on Tahrir Square in Cairo. But suddenly, what was intended as a look back on the past becomes the present, with the people around us carrying Molotov cocktails and fleeing into buildings to escape the military. No one has time to recount stories of the revolution in past tense.

The revolution has returned, as our journey ends on the banks of the Nile in mid-December. Revolutions are mysterious events, hard to grab hold of, never quite over and always alarming.

KILOMETER 4,510, Umm Sa'ad, border crossing to Egypt

Since Tobruk in Libya, the North African highway has been following a different route. Like a palimpsest, a page from a book that has been overwritten again and again, the asphalt conceals the tank routes of World War II Generals Erwin Rommel and Bernard Montgomery. There are military cemeteries along the road, side-by-side with the concrete hotels of beach resorts. Late one evening in Benghazi, a militia commander told us he wanted to build a museum for Rommel in his hometown of Tobruk. He said he admired the former German field marshal for his strategies, his tricks and his tenacity. "You Germans are always welcome here," he said.

On the other side of the border, in Libya, the names of martyrs were written on the walls, but now, in Egypt, it is the names of election candidates. There are symbols printed next to their photos to help voters recognize them. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood has picked a motorcycle as his symbol, while another has chosen a CD, and a third candidate a surfboard. In the more remote cities, the Muslim Brotherhood has set up a service to drive older citizens to the polling places. It also helps them check the boxes on their ballots.

A poster for the Muslim Brotherhood depicts smiling men with impressive facial hair: trapezoid-shaped goatees, with or without moustaches, sometimes as voluminous as a small fur coat. It looks like an invitation to some sort of a contest.