Although the fish we find in the east are generally more distinguished for their beauty and variety of colours, or for their uncouth forms, rather than for the goodness of the fish itself, this before us appears to be an exception; though it is not without singularities, yet its form and colour are very simple, and, for the elegance of its taste, may vie with any fish caught in any river which runs either into the Mediterranean or Ocean. Whether it is the Latus, or the Oxyrinchus of antiquity, both fishes of the Nile, so famous that divine honours were paid them, by large cities, nomes, or districts situated upon that river, is what I am not naturalist enough to discover. Such as it is, in all its parts, I have placed it before the reader faithfully. By the disproportion in the length of its jaws, I should imagine this to be a fish of prey, though a circumstance concerning the bait with which it is taken seems to contradict this. The fish from which this drawing was made weighed 32 pounds English, but is often caught of 70 pounds and upwards, as I have been told by the fishermen, for I never saw one larger than the one I am now describing. The largest of this kind are caught about Rosetto and the mouth of the river, but they are very numerous, higher up as far as Syene and the first cataract. This was caught at Achmim, the ancient Panopolis, and the manner in which this is performed is very uncommon and ingenious, and by the few trials that I saw is also very successful. They take a quantity of oil, clay, flour, and honey, with straw, and some other thing that makes it stick together, they knead or tread it with their feet till it is perfectly mixed. They then take two handfuls of dates, and break them into small pieces about the bigness of the point of the finger, and stick them in different parts of this mixture, which begins now to have such consistency as to adhere perfectly together, and appears in form like a Cheshire cheese. In the heart of this cake they put seven or eight hooks, with dates upon them, and a string of strong whip-cord to each. The fisherman then takes this large mass of paste, and putting it upon a goat’s skin blown with wind, rides behind it out into the middle of the stream; there he drops it in the deepest part of the river, then cautiously holding the ends of each of the strings slack, so as not to pull the dates and the hooks out of the heart of the composition, he gets again ashore upon his skin a little below where he had sunk the solid mass.