32 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



drifts and breeds in its warm tropical waters. Whales have always 

 abounded therein and it was ordained that men should sooner or 

 later meet them in that place. 



It appears that this sea-country has changed little since men first 

 settled upon its shores. The identity of these first settlers has been 

 lost in the mists of time, but we find their crude stone implements 

 scattered all along the arid strands of Oman and Makran, and more 

 sparingly upon the Malabar coast of India. They have been called 

 the Proto-Negroids and Proto-Dravidians, meaning simply those 

 who went before the Negro peoples on the African side and those 

 who preceded the Dravidians on the Indian side. Where these two 

 types met is undeterminable, but they probably had much in com- 

 mon and mingled throughout the area from southern Arabia to 

 Sind. There is still discernible a trace of this very ancient stock in 

 the inhabitants of these coasts and, furthermore, the culture, or 

 virtual lack of it, of some of the more isolated and backward among 

 them today gives us perhaps a clearer picture of the lives of the 

 original settlers than anything we may learn from digging up stone 

 implements or from mere speculation, however profound it may be 

 or upon whatever comparative researches it may be founded. 



Some of these people still employ the most primitive kinds of 

 boats that could possibly go upon the sea, or upon any other body 

 of water for that matter. The fishermen of the coast of Muscat at 

 the entrance to the Gulf of Oman make a craft called a ramas com- 

 posed of three logs bound together with coconut-fiber ropes. There 

 is no attempt to shape the logs, but they are chosen as far as possible 

 with a similar curve, and the largest is placed in the center so that 

 it sticks out of the water fore and aft. The boats are propelled with 

 poles or paddled and there is as much water inside as out. On the 

 Batima coast an even more primitive vessel known as a shasha is 

 still in use. This consists of two large bundles of date sticks — the 

 long, thin sticks of the palm's flower-bunch upon which the dates 

 are borne — filled with strips of bark and masses of coconut fiber. 

 These bundles are bound with coconut fiber, laid side by side, and 

 their slender, pointed ends are brought together and firmly tied. 

 The date-stick bundles are then joined by a kind of monstrous sew- 

 ing along the center line, and a canoe-shaped structure results. 

 These boats are about twelve feet long and can carry two people, 



