GEOGRAPHY AND EAST AFRICA 209 



When I took the chair the next day, the zeal of 

 Mr. W. was conspicuous in the diagrams he had 

 hung round the walls like a frieze. Each diagram 

 contained a representation of one of the 35 or so 

 characters. Below it was its Hebrew equivalent, and 

 below all was a free translation, in which I noted 

 there were more words than there were letters in the 

 original, and my misgivings grew. The paper proved 

 to be long and tedious, as papers on antiquarian sub- 

 jects often are, and the audience melted away. At 

 length the reporters could stand . it no longer, and 

 most fortunately left also. The audience was then 

 reduced to a mere handful of persons, and when the 

 paper was finished Mr. C. rose, who was a recognised 

 authority on Greek manuscripts, and said that he 

 had no pretensions in respect to a knowledge of 

 Phenician, but as a mere question of resemblance it 

 struck him that the characters (which he pointed out) 

 seemed to him less like the alleged Hebrew equiva- 

 lents than to the letters forming the Greek word 

 ALEXANDROS. There was no doubt he was 

 right, and the small audience tittered. In the mean- 

 time the Secretary, a well-known antiquarian, became 

 more and more excited, and jumped up as soon as Mr. 

 C. had sat down, and exclaimed, " Phenician ! " (Con- 

 temptuous grunt.) " Greek ! " (Another different and 

 equally contemptuous grunt.) "Can you not read 

 ' HIC JACET ' ? " and I must say his reading seemed 

 to me the least forced of the three. I think all of us 

 felt utterly ashamed. Had the reporters been present, 

 the fun that could have been made by the newspapers 

 out of the incident would have been a disaster to the 

 credit of the Association. The Reports of that 

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