The Days of a Man 1914 



D Jidda the ancient city of D Jidda, its very name calling up 

 memories of Arabian Nights, " Said the Fisherman/' 

 tortuous guile, and sore-footed pilgrims Mecca-bound. 

 Furthermore, it was at Djidda in 1770, in the begin- 

 nings of our knowledge of marine life, that Per 

 Forskal of Upsala, the able disciple of Linnaeus, 

 studied fishes. 



Aden Coming out from the Red Sea into the open gulf, we 



soon reached Aden, a British naval station walled in 

 by barren brown hills. Here there was no time to 

 land, and hence no fishes so far as I was concerned. 

 Farther on we passed the bold headland of Cape 

 Guardafui and its island of Socotra, with the high 



Somali- mesa of Somaliland at the back. In this dreary blood- 



land stained plateau the Mad Mullah used to break out at 

 intervals against two just as mad imperialisms, lured 

 on by the ignis fatuus of Africa, "the mirage of the 

 inap." 1 The next shore to appear is the low, flat 

 archipelago of the Laccadives, seemingly well fitted 

 for fishing but to me as inaccessible as the mountains 

 of the moon. 



The first part of my ten days' wait for the Fried- 

 rich der Grosse I spent at Colombo, collecting and 

 Kandy looking about. I then proceeded to Kandy, a de- 

 lightful town of the highlands, where monkeys swarm 

 in the forests and elephants lie every day flat in the 

 sand of the shallow river, demanding only a banana 

 in return for their condescension. There I found 

 Fisher, who had already caught a number of species 

 from the Mahaweli River, which flows through Kandy 

 to the East. One of them, a big dace new to science, 

 Starks and I afterward named Labeo fisheri. At Kandy 



1 A phrase first used by Norman Angell. 



n 562 3 



