GULL-BILLED TERN. 265 



tions to Neptune. At four o'clock day begau to dawn^ the Greek.s yawned, 

 weii>lied anchor, rowed through the straits into the now quiet sea, hoisted 

 sail, and for half an hour we ran gaily along the coast, in the glorious 

 morning sun, in the best of spirits, '^ with youth on the prow, and plea- 

 sure at the helm." But alas for the briefness of human happiness! At 

 the end of half an hour the next worst thing to a storm befell us, namely 

 a calm. The sails flapped idly against the mast and we were obliged 

 to take to the oars. There was just enough sea on to make rowing hard 

 w^ork, and we were lamenting our adverse fate, when a breeze once more 

 wooed our sails, we made five-and-twenty knots in three hours, and entered 

 a lagoon, shut off from the main sea by a range of long flat islands, 

 scarcely rising six inches above the level of the blue water. These islands 

 were the seat of a trade by no means unimportant in the East, the manu- 

 facture of salt, a monopoly of the Imperial Ottoman Government. Long 

 before we neared the shore, we could see pyramids of salt, mountains of 

 salt as high as a house. Large pools on these flat islands are flooded with 

 salt Avater, which soon evaporates under the broiling sun, leaving the salt 

 behind, which is afterwards dug out and piled up into a mountain. We 

 landed on a wooden pier, a few slender boards supported by piles, glad to 

 reach terra firma again. 



I had not sufficiently recovered from my midnight occupation to do 

 more than nibble a biscuit for breakfast, but a cafe turque and a pull at 

 a nargilleh revived me. We got into a flat-bottomed boat manned with 

 Greeks armed with long forked poles, with which they pushed us along, 

 the Avater in the lagoon being scarcely a foot deep. A flock of Lesser 

 Terns which frequented the salt islands gave a tone to my system ; a 

 few Common Terns, a Caspian Tern, and a Pelican hove in sight — I 

 felt equal to a sandwich ! and when we landed on one of the large islands 

 in the middle of the lagoon, with scores of Pratincoles pretending to be 

 wounded on the ground at our feet, and hundreds of Gull-billed Terns 

 flying wildly over our heads, my sea-sickness and sleepless night were 

 completely forgotten. There were two large islands in the middle of the 

 lagoon and several smaller ones. The one on which we landed was scarcely 

 six inches above the level of the sea, and was full of large tracts of cracked 

 mud, between which patches of the usual short marine vegetation were 

 conspicuous on a sandy ground. We soon found plenty of eggs of the 

 Gull-billed Tern ; the nests were not very close to each other, but they 

 were all in one part of the island ; the eggs were on the sand, never on 

 the black mud ; some were lying in slight natural hollows between the 

 patches of vegetation on the bare sand, without any attempt at a nest, but 

 generally a slight hollow was scratched in the earth or sand, and a few 

 bits of seaweed or dead grass frequently formed an apology for a nest. 

 The most common number of eggs in each nest was two; three was not 



