We had very little milk while there; none till the last two days. A man was drinking a bowlful in our camp, and this is the surprising way in which he did it: he dipped his hand in and sucked his fingers (not clean ones at first), and so continued till he had finished it all up. Our visitors used sometimes suddenly to hurry off to pray, choosing a bit of damp sand, and when they returned some of the sand was sticking to their foreheads. The longer that sand stayed on the better, as it was considered a sign of a religious man. We had an anxious battle with white ants also. A basket was nearly devoured by them, but our best steamer raiment was preserved by the inner lining of American cloth, though they were sitting on it in sheets. We had remarked in South Africa that they never eat mackintosh. The basket was brushed over the sea, steeped in the lagoon, and inundated with boiling water. This was the only thing attacked of all that we had left behind when we were in Hadibo the first time. Our brown ship, 70 feet in length by 15 wide, did really look a very 'mere nutshell' to go 500 miles over the great ocean in, but it was far, far better than some we had been in. From the deck Sokotra looked almost too beautiful to leave. The weather was very rough, the sailors not nearly ready, and it was midday before we started. By this time all the servants were prostrate, and my husband had to get the sailors to help him in setting up our beds, and arranging the baggage in the place between decks astern, which was 31/2 feet high, and, as the beds had to be tied to each other, 2 feet apart, as well as to the sides of the ship, we had to bend low and step high when moving about. The two Somali servants managed wonderfully to take it in turns to be well after a bit, but Matthaios was one of the worst, so food was a difficulty and his wrath was great when, Mahmoud having made us tea like ink, he found the tea canister empty. We had rough weather enough, but the wind was favourable. We were always afraid of falling off our seats at meals, for we were perched anywhere, on anything we could get, round our kitchen box as a table. Bruises alone were not the cause of our terror, but the fact is that the sailors were always shaking their raiment and making those searching and successful investigations, accompanied by that unmistakable movement of the elbows and backs of the thumb-nails, which literally 'give one the creeps.' The captain had a compass, but no other instrument of any kind, and none of the sailors seemed to know the way. They showed us islands, which we knew to be such, as the African coast, and Cape Guardafui where we knew it could not be.