l86 DAHLAK 



the beach crabs would restore to us, cleaned up, and per- 

 forming any other duty that came my way. Giorgio dis- 

 appeared under his photographer's dark cloth, while 

 Tesfankièl, moaning that the spaghetti had been ready for 

 hours and was now uneatable, managed to tell us at the same 

 time how he had spent the day and all the things he had 

 done. It was amazing how long he took to tell us that he 

 had done absolutely nothing. 



Apart from our underwater activity proper, our greatest 

 satisfaction came from the triple nets. Unfortunately, we had 

 only three, each thirty yards long and well made. After a 

 month of dropping them they were reduced to shreds, torn 

 by the coral or sawn by the tails of sting-rays, while sharks 

 and barracudas, attracted to them by the small prey already 

 trapped, had rent holes that would have let a man through. 



Among the commonest prey in the fixed nets were the 

 sting-rays (the common species already encountered in the 

 flooded mangrove forest of Sheikh Said, Sasyatis sephen), I 

 recall a moving episode which occurred on the sixth of 

 March. We had stretched the nets on the beach and were 

 going over them methodically, extracting the prisoners. In 

 addition to fifty other fish there were about ten stingrays in 

 the mesh. This irritated us somewhat, as the discoid shape of 

 a stingray makes it difficult to draw them out of a net, not 

 to mention the attendant danger of the poisonous tail, which 

 is always ready to sting a hand. We were no longer interested 

 in this species and they caused us to waste a lot of time. 



I had already liberated three and thrown them back, dead 

 or alive, into the sea. On freeing a fourth I noticed it shudder 

 and apparently swell. I turned it on its back and saw a 



