16 Red Sea Shells. 



of brandy bottles, and despatched it next day to London, charged 

 with a more lively if less spirituous freight. 



I should like to tell you many interesting facts connected with 

 my desert travels, because there is a certain satisfaction in talking 

 of things about which no one knows so much as yourself, but as I 

 have promised to read a paper on shells, I ought not to wander 

 from the sea shore. One thing, however, I should like to impress 

 upon all who may hereafter travel in my steps. If you should get 

 as far as Sinai, and then be told that Petra is inaccessible, and 

 that it is no use making the six days journey to Akaba, but that 

 you may as well strike north at once through the main desert to 

 Hebron. Just go on, and never mind what your dragoman says. 

 Arabs have no sense of natural beauty, and if you are fairly beaten 

 by the Alawiu Bedouins at last, as I was, and have to turn back 

 upon your course from Akaba, you will find, unless I am much 

 mistaken, that though you have a great and terrible wilderness 

 before you, you have been compensated in advance by seeing 

 nature, now in her oddest, now in her sublimest, now in her 

 loveliest garb. There is nothing in all that region of wild forms 

 and sudden contrasts, so strange as the sandstone archipelago of 

 Hudherah (Hazeroth) ; nothing, I believe, in any mountain scenery 

 to surpass the granite gorge of the Wady el Ain for mingled 

 majesty and gloom ; nothing so like what you might fancy the 

 shore of fairyland to be as the sunlit beach of Bahr Akaba. 



Never shall 1 forget the shout of " El Bahr !" that rose with 

 the rising of that sweet blue sea in the distance, on the third day 

 after we left Sinai. You can have little idea what the sight of real 

 water is to desert-wearied eyes. And then, such water and 

 such a shore : this bluer than painter could paint it, if he dared : 

 that ever whitening with white shells, or variegated with " some- 

 thing rich and strange" from the sea nymphs treasure house. 



I am afraid, gentlemen, it is monstrously unscientific to mention 

 sea nymphs in your company, so by way of amends for this slip, 

 I will select a few typical shells from my collection by way of 

 texts, and try to hang a few shreds of information from them which 

 may be new to some of you. King among the shells of that sea 

 shore is the giant clam, or cham, not that you find such monsters 

 lying on the beach as you may see full of holy water in the church 

 of St. Sulpice at Paris, although single valves of considerable size 

 and weight are here and there as plentiful as stones. The clam 

 which belongs to the genus Tridacnidae is only found in warm 

 seas, and chiefly among coral reefs to which he attaches himself, 

 like many other bivalves, by spinning a cable (or byssus, as it is 

 called). This cable is sometimes so strong as to require an axe 

 to sever it from the rock. The strength of the creature is also 



