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of that order, it would speak in a loud voice even in their simple 

 lives. Hunt came and went. He sometimes carried local produce, 

 and dealt also in dried fish and sharks. There is an enormous trade 

 in salted sharks in the tropical western Indian Ocean, for they are 

 greatly relished by all races and command an astonishing price. 

 This was one of our problems at Zanzibar, for when we found a 

 rare shark on the market, its price was so ruinous we could not 

 afford to buy it as a specimen. I soon hit on the idea of hiring 

 sharks and other big fish for the special purpose of photographing 

 them, of making notes and taking measurements, and then bar- 

 gaining with the owner for parts like the teeth and sometimes the 

 head and skin. There was not much they did not eat. The sharks 

 are salted but not sun dried ; this is a special process not used in 

 South Africa. The smell from the big concrete underground shark 

 salting-pits of Zanzibar is pretty grim. When the wind shifts to 

 the north you have it all day and all night. The food of those 

 near by tastes of it. 



At the close of our work in Zanzibar we went to Pemba ; then 

 to Kenya, where we spent several months working over a wide 

 area of the coast. This expedition was most absorbing, but exact- 

 ing and exhausting. The whole area proved so rich that we almost 

 killed ourselves in that hot and humid climate trying to squeeze 

 the utmost from the time. We had got together an enormous col- 

 lection, certainly more than ten thousand selected specimens, 

 with numbers of great rarities and many fascinating forms new 

 to science. The last few weeks that took us into December 1952 

 had been especially trying, with little wind, the nights close and 

 still, and since malaria was rampant, we lay naked and sweating 

 under nets, vainly trying to sleep. All you got was a kind of vague 

 and patchy, formless, clammy doze. 



Throughout this expedition we had continually carried on the 

 Coelacanth hunt, talking and giving out leaflets. It had been my 

 good fortune to solve the mystery of the identity of a strange fish, 

 a man-size Parrot-fish which was only occasionally seen. It was a 

 curious creature with a big hump on its head, but at that time its 

 scientific identity was unknown. I hunted for this creature con- 

 tinually and offered a reward for one, but in vain, until the day 

 before we were due to leave Shimoni finally for Mombasa, when 

 by the greatest good fortune I spotted over two hundred of these 



