I first got the boat on shore, and a crowd of course soon collected, while I arranged its interior, and sponged out the splashed water, and fastened the cover down. Then, tightening my belt for a walk, I looked round with a kind smile, and selecting a likely man, would address him in English deliberately as follows--suiting each action to the word, for I have always found that sign language is made more natural when you speak your own tongue all the time you are acting:--"Well now, I think as you have looked on enough and have seen all you want, it's about time to go to an hotel, a _gasthaus_. Here! you--yes, _you_!--just take that end of the boat up, so,--gently, '_langsam!_' '_langsam!_'--all right, yes, under your arm, like this,--now march off to the best hotel, _gasthaus_." [Illustration: "Langsam."] Then the procession naturally formed itself. The most humorous boys of course took precedence, because of services or mischief willing to be performed; and, meanwhile, they gratuitously danced about and under the canoe like Fauns around Silenus. Women only came near and waited modestly till the throng had passed. The seniors of the place kept on the safer confines of the movement, where dignity of gait might comport with close observation. In a case of sign talking like the foregoing you can be helped by one substantive and one adverb; and if you pronounce these clearly, and use them correctly, while all the other expressions are evidently _your_ language and not theirs, they will understand it much better than if you try signs in dumb show or say the whole in bad German, and so give rise to all possible mistakes of your meaning. But it is quite another matter when you have forgotten (or have never acquired) the foreign word for the noun you wish to name, though, even then, by well chosen signs, and among an intelligent people, a good deal can be conveyed, as may be shown in the following cases. Once I was riding among the Arabs along the Algerian coast, on my way from Carthage, and my guide, a dense Kabyle, was evidently taking me past a place I wished to visit, and which had been duly entered in the list when he was engaged. I could not make him understand this, for my limited Arabic had been acquired under a different pronunciation in Syria; but one night, it happened that a clever chief had me in a tent, or rather a hut, just like the top of a gipsy cart. I explained to him by signs (and talking English) that the muleteer was taking me past the place it was desired to see. Then I tried to pronounce the name of that place, but was always wrong, or he could not make it out; it was Maskutayn, or "bewitched waters," a wonderful volcanic valley, full of boiling streams and little volcanoes of salt.