34 DAHLAK 



or put us in serious danger. All they did was to put up the 

 natural and automatic defence which every fish puts up on 

 capture. On the other hand, it is certain that if a frogman 

 through bad luck or lack of foresight should trip into those 

 huge teeth while recovering the animal, he could not help 

 but have very unpleasant memories of the encounter. But 

 this could equally well happen with any large-sized grouper 

 or bream. It would be difficult to say how many barracudas 

 we encountered in every circumstance (armed, unarmed, or 

 while photographing) and in every habitat (algae, sand and 

 coral from two to sixty feet deep), but there were certainly 

 several hundreds of them, without counting an entire shoal 

 of two or three hundred, in the middle of which Cecco once 

 finished up by mistake while lying in wait for a platoon of 

 dolphins in deep sea. An identical experience came Priscilla's 

 way near Kosseir on the return trip. Not one of them ever 

 attacked us, not one of them even gave us a serious fright as 

 the sharks did. It may therefore be said that the barracuda 

 (at least the Red Sea one), terrible as it looks, is normally 

 inoffensive to man. 



That evening, while we were still discussing Gigi's barra- 

 cuda, the beast had the audacity to reappear. A black boy 

 came to the quay where the Formica lay and told us that an 

 hour before a native fisherman had found a monstrous pike 

 afloat belly upwards in the middle of the bay, and into it 

 was stuck one of those strange long things of ours. We gave 

 him no time to finish. Cecco and I dashed to the native fish 

 market accompanied by an eager compatriot. But it was 

 already dark, and for all our asking and searching and 

 reassuring them that we didn't want the flesh but only the 

 head and the 'odd, iron thing', we met only a disagreeable 

 and sinister silence. Nobody knew about it, nobody had seen 

 it. A fish like that would have kept that poor Massawan 



