A Pale Glow in the East 33 



who sit in them with water up to their waists. They are, however, 

 extremely tough and pliable and see years of hard service in the 

 great surf that pounds endlessly upon those shores. 



Similar waterlogged craft are found along the Makran coast of 

 Baluchistan among some very lowly tribes of fish-eaters who dwell 

 there. These people were known to the classical writers as the 

 Ichthyophagi and they appear to have lived then just as they do 

 today. Nor do they seem to have changed at all in their way of 

 life since earliest prehistoric times. They still make much use of 

 whale products, and since theirs is a treeless land and there is no 

 other building material available, the ribs of the larger whales are 

 often employed as supports for their huts. They were using whale 

 ribs thus in 300 B.C., because it was observed at that date by Near- 

 chus the Greek, as we shall see later. The Shihuh of Cape Musandam 

 on the southern shore of the narrow strait of Hormuz at the en- 

 trance to the Persian Gulf similarly use whale jaws for door posts 

 and whale ribs as rafters. What is more, all these people still carry 

 on a regular trade in the teeth of the smaller whales and dolphins, 

 and this also they seem to have done since prehistoric times. 



It is obvious that people dwelling upon a treeless and often abso- 

 lutely vegetationless coast would turn to the sea for their food and 

 for other necessities. It is also patent that they would then, as now, 

 from time to time come upon whales cast up on the shore and would 

 quickly discover, just as our neolithic ancestors did around the 

 North Sea, the value of these great carcasses to their perpetually 

 strained and inadequate economy. We have seen that scores of 

 whales are stranded around the British Isles every year; the same 

 thing occurs along the coasts of the Arabian Sea. Ramas and shashas 

 are, moreover, just as seaworthy as skin canoes and umiaks, and in 

 them the ancient peoples of the Arabian seacoasts followed the 

 smaller whales beyond the surf, then, just as they do today. Here, 

 as in western Europe, whales, of all the creatures to be found in the 

 sea, were the most valuable to primitive man, and he appears to have 

 been prepared to take any risks to capture them. 



The story of man's conquest of the sea is one of the principal 

 themes of our story and it must therefore be understood that the 

 shasha in the East and the skin canoe in the West were not the only 

 prototypes of all later ships. There was another contemporary point 



