ABSTRACT
As I said, I had no definite plans when I bought the Sahala. . . . I had a vague project of going in for pearl fishing on my own, with crews of Soudanese divers, north of the Straits of Bab el Mandeb. The richest pearl fields lie in the Red Sea, a perilous region, as I well knew, for the amateur navigator. I contented myself at first with getting the hang of my newly acquired craft, cruising along the Dankali coast, and making brief excursions into the Gulf of Aden. In the meantime, with Abdi's help, I continued my experiments at pearl cultivating. We fished for more sada.fs, and I succeeded in operating a fair number of oysters. I had shifted my nursery to Mascali Island, five miles north of Djibouti, for three times the cases of oysters we deposited on the shoal off Djibouti disappeared mysteriously. Out of half a dozen cases sunk with infinite
45 pains, I recovered only one that had slid off the shoal into deep water-a delicate task, in the course of which I came near losing one of my best divers. My nursery on the island I placed in care of the lighthouse keeper, a Dankali named Bourha who with his family constituted the sole population of Mascali. He had lived there for eighteen years on a princely income of twelve francs a month, raising goats and sheep and a family of several dozen children, for as a prosperous citizen he possessed four legitimate WIves.
