110 QUAILS. 



prodigious flights of Quails, which alight on the 

 coasts of the Black Sea, near the Bosphorus, and 

 are caught by means of nets spread on high poles, 

 planted along the cliff, some yards from its edge, 

 against which, the birds, exhausted by their passage 

 over the sea, strike themselves and fall. In October, 

 1829, the Sultan sent orders to one of his admirals 

 to catch four hundred dozen. In three days they 

 were collected, and brought to' him alive in small 

 cages/' Another traveller* tells us, that they visit 

 Egypt in immense flights about harvest-time, where 

 the Arabs take them by thousands, in nets. They 

 fly, he adds, in a direct line from north to south, 

 and very rarely from east to west. With respect 

 to their being dried in the sun for food, we have 

 equally good evidence from a third traveller t, a 

 foreigner, whose words we will therefore translate. 

 There is, says he, a small island off the coast of 

 Egypt, where these birds usually alight in the 

 Autumn, on which they are taken in such quantities, 

 that, after having been stripped of their feathers, 

 and dried in the burning sands for about a quarter 

 of an hour, they are worth but one penny a pound. 

 The crews of those vessels which in that season 

 lie in the adjacent harbour, have no other food 

 allowed them. The object of the Israelites, there- 

 fore, in spreading them round the camp, was to 

 dry them: a mode of preparing fish and camels' 

 flesh, still practised by the Arabs in the very same 

 country. 



The only difficulty seems to be in their being so 



* Madden, vol. ii. f Maillet. 



