CHAPTER II SIR RIVERS WILSON'S MISSION

On leaving Cairo that spring of 1876 we paid our first visit to the confines of Arabia. It was then more the custom with European tourists than it is now to go on from Egypt into Syria by way of the desert, and we took once more to our camels and our tent life, and with the same Bedouins who had escorted us from Suez, crossed the Suez Canal and made a long tour through the Sinai peninsula and on by Akabah to Jerusalem. As we were strange to the country we passed through, and were still very ignorant of Arabic and had with us no dragoman, we got into some rather perilous adventures which are now amusing to recollect, though at the time they were disagreeable enough. It is perhaps worth recording as a curious accident of travel that as we were passing along the shore of the Gulf of Akabah, which is fringed in places with coral reefs, we had stopped to examine these and to admire the wonderful colours, purple, gold, and vermilion, of the innumerable little fishes which live in them. I was standing thus at the sea's edge, my gun, which I always then carried, in my hand, when I saw a great commotion in the water near me and suddenly, before I was well aware of the cause, a large shark, one of a shoal, leaving the rest came straight to where I stood and was already within a few yards of me before I understood what manner of fish it was or that I was the object of its attack. I had barely time to raise my gun when it turned, as these fishes do, on its side and rose half out of the water to take hold of me, and it was so near me when I fired that my charge of small shot killed it without the need of a second barrel, so that we were able, with the help of a lasso, to bring it high and dry on shore. It was a very large one, nearly ten feet long, and I do not doubt that if I had been a little more careless than I was I might have been carried from the