14 



black mud which sucked at my shoes. I grinned. At least I 

 had become acquainted with the tide, about which I had 

 read so much. 



I walked on towards the lights still telling myself that on 

 the morrow a new and fabulous world would be opened to 

 me. A shiver of anticipation ran down my spine. 



'So you're not frightened of sharks?' 



'Good God!' I thought, 'I've been asked this hundreds of 

 times.' I glanced at my companions round the table in the 

 Bar Savoia; they were all Italians who had heard about the 

 expedition. They knew about me too, as they had read an 

 article of mine on sharks which had been reprinted shortly 

 before in one of the Eritrean dailies. My arrival had been 

 expected and I had been given the sort of welcome that only 

 expatriates receiving a fellow countryman can give. Now 

 they wanted to know everything and above all they wanted 

 to talk about sharks. They considered themselves experts on 

 the subject simply because they lived in Massawa, and 

 therefore tried to tell me, not without a hint of superiority, 

 that the sharks I knew were one thing, but the sharks of the 

 Red Sea were quite another. 



One of them poured me a glass of beer. 'So you want to go 

 to Green Island? I saw an eighteen-foot shark there yester- 

 day, you know.' 



'Yes, and I was bitten by a blue shark,' said a small, 

 powerfully-built man pulling up his trouser leg . . . 'look 

 here.' At the base of his calf was a large violet scar. He said 

 he did odd diving jobs. 



'At Ras Dogon, not a mile from here,' a third put in, 'I 

 saw more than a couple of thousand of them all together. 



