As soon as we alighted, the various chiefs had business to attend to, and I was despatched to fish. I was furnished with a long pole, on the end of which was a piece of thin rope to which was further riveted a hook. There was also a box of worms. My guide was an ex-soldier dressed in a tattered burnous on which was proudly pinned the Croix de Guerre, and under which he wore a seedy frock coat with satin facings. He had no socks, but a pair of very battered slippers. After trudging through the fields of standing barley for about half an hour we came to a kind of brown ditch with a rivulet one yard broad trickling sadly down the middle. “Here is the river,” said the guide proudly. I said nothing, but looked anxiously into the trickle, but all I could see were five or six tortoises paddling about. Eton days when I kept these beasts in a biscuit box in the wash-stand, hidden from the eagle eyes of m’tutor, returned to me, but I somehow did not connect them with rods and hooks. My companion seemed to read my thoughts. “The fish are further on,” he said simply; “come!” I followed him along the bank and eventually we came to a deep, muddy pool about twenty feet square. The Arab squatted down, knotted a cork into the middle of the rope, baited my hook and handed me the pole. I took it and felt inclined to laugh. It reminded me of that stupid Christmas game where one fishes for useless presents out of a tub. However, I lowered the worm into the opaque water and waited. Two minutes had hardly passed when down went the cork. Instinctively I struck. Memories of sudden thrills by tumbling streams, the hiss of a line running out, the bend of the rod, flashed before me. But they were only visions, for I had struck so violently, and the string or cable at the end of my pole was so strong, that I jerked the fish right out of the pool and on to the bank. My fisherman instantly rescued it from the hook and I took it up to examine it. I expected to find the mud-fish which I had often come across in certain Indian rivers; but not at all. In shape it resembled a perch, but though the fins were red, there were none of the sharp points on the back, and the color was more that of a carp. Its weight was about two ounces. I continued fishing. We visited some three or four pools, and in two hours I caught nearly one hundred of these fish. The majority were like the first, but there were a dozen or so of over a quarter of a pound, and two must have weighed a good twelve ounces. Finally surfeited with this somewhat crane-like occupation, I trudged back. Clouds were banking up over there toward the north, and the Arab watched them with interest. “Two days, rain now, _sidi_,” he exclaimed, “will double our crops and afford pasturage for the flocks for the rest of the summer.”