DISSEI, BROWN ISLAND 4I 



a kind of herbal dyke, flowering sargassus-weeds that spring 

 from the rocks beneath forming an underwater wall, while 

 on the surface they lie like the streaming green-brown hair 

 of a mermaid. So dense is this barrier of vegetation that it is 

 often impossible to cross it in a boat. Strangely enough for 

 the Red Sea, it is a very poor zone for fish and we did not 

 catch a thing, although Gigi and Cecco ran over it all. At 

 one point Gigi saw a black-fin shark hovering at Cecco's 

 heels, nosing his feet; he in his turn shadowed it, but it 

 became aware of him, took a vertiginous plunge, and was 

 not seen again. Cecco had not realized that anything odd 

 was going on. Gigi also assisted at a curious scene in which 

 a four-foot barracuda was dashing after a turtle of at least a 

 hundredweight. Gigi launched himself into a hunt for one or 

 the other but both, still racing, disappeared into open sea. 



Our last Massawan immersion was at Ras Dogon, and it 

 was a spectacular one. Here, too, was no reef worth speaking 

 of, only an uninterruped chain of madreporic blocks a 

 dozen yards wide, that at a depth of fifteen to twenty feet 

 formed a distinct line of demarcation between the shallows 

 of the littoral and the sands of the deep. The quantity of 

 fauna on this odd sort of reef was something unimaginable ; 

 only at Cundabilu and once at Dur Ghella did we see any- 

 thing like it. The water was still dirty, but the bottom could 

 often not be seen, not because of the veil of plankton (the 

 lower Red Sea would in fact be quite limpid if it were not 

 for the plankton which, with its milliards of microscopic 

 organisms in suspension, almost entirely absorbs the rays of 

 the sun) but for the multitude offish. Fishes of not more than 

 two pounds, but hundreds of thousands of them in throngs, 

 shoals, banks; we seemed to be swimming not in water but 

 in fish. They were mostly the very common yellow diagrams 

 or gaterin-fish, coralline fish, small groupers, dozens of kinds 



