NOTHING quite prepares you for the shock of entering a depopulated city. An uninhabited urban environment is a paradox, like a populous desert.

But 11 days after the worst natural disaster in American history, and a week after the murderous mayhem that followed, that is what New Orleans has become: the first vacant city in the industrialised world; a vast, spectral, post-holocaust expanse of shattered buildings, watery emptiness and unnumbered dead.

Among the streets of empty houses in the elegant Garden District, stopped only now and then by soldiers who inspect your press pass and cheerfully wave you on, you get an uneasy sense of what the Vandals must have felt like as they picked over Rome’s ruins, or what the first explorers may have seen as they stumbled into Alexandria’s library.

Perhaps this is an early glimpse of the post-American era that some pundits predict, a hint of what Soviet military planners and now al-Qaeda fanatics have long plotted. But the architects of this city’s demise were nature, neglect and inhumanity.

The first, guilty thought as you breeze through the empty suburbs is the magnificent freedom that a dead city offers its visitors. Urban life is a maze of pesky regulations, speed limits and parking restrictions. Now the only vehicles on the road are emergency vehicles, convoys of military trucks and jeeps and TV vans and reporters’ cars.

You can drive the wrong way down one-way streets, reverse up motorway exit ramps, barrel down the wrong side of an urban freeway, as police officers wave you through.

The only constraints are nature’s — water and downed trees — and man’s greatest enemy: himself.

At the end of one quiet, half waterlogged street, a polite soldier tells me, “It’s not safe around here.” “Why?” I ask. “Guns, gangs, that kind of thing,” he says laconically.

In a dead city the senses are overwhelmed by the incongruities — boats that plough along streets above the “Stop” signs, mattresses lined up in hotel driveways. But soon the incongruities themselves become familiar. Most poignant are the pitiful witnesses to human catastrophe left behind. It is too early for the clean-up yet, so like Pompeii, the evidence of flight and death are still frozen on the city’s streets.

The strangest are the shoes.Gumboots, trainers, children’s footwear scattered on the elevated interstate freeway — the highest point to which desperate residents fled from rising waters and the terrors of the Superdome “shelter” nearby, only to find that they had to wait three days in the baking sub-tropical sun for rescue. Outside the Convention Centre muddy shoes and filthy hospital slippers were gratefully abandoned among the rotting food as the sick finally crowded on to buses to take them to real safety.

Here another tragic irony unfolded as many of those who had been rescued from their submerged homes were dumped and left to die from dehydration and disease; some, it seems were even murdered and their mutilated bodies left inside. Shoes floating in the waters of the Lower Ninth District, where many of the city’s poorest lived and, last week, died.

Most incongruous of all, in the poorest parts of town, new shoes outside demolished shops, evidently tried on by some rather choosy looter and discarded for something nicer. These last are a reminder here that what was not destroyed by the wind and the water, man quickly took care of.

In the Faubourg Marigny, an elegantly raffish neighbourhood of neat, Victorian houses not far from the French Quarter James Marriam, one of the last holdouts against the mandatory evacuation order told me about the violence after the storm. The looting began late Monday he said, and was over by Wednesday. “When the police got here?” I ask. “No,” he laughs. “The first law enforcement officers I saw came on Monday, a full week after Katrina.” The looting stopped five days earlier only because there was nothing left to loot, he added. The sounds of an ex-city are distinctive too. The silence, even in the French Quarter, is punctuated by the barking of abandoned dogs, the occasional siren and the clicking of photographers’ cameras. Helicopters are the noisiest of all — buzzing in the distance, whump, whump whumping directly overhead.

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