While the great bulk of the pearls are either white or yellowish, these fisheries yield a few pink, bluish, gray, and occasionally even black pearls. These unusual colors are not especially prized. A curious and remarkably detailed story has gone the rounds in which the qualities of Persian and Ceylon pearls are compared, to the disparagement of the latter, and during the last hundred years few accounts have been published of this fishery without recording it. We notice it first in Morier’s “Journey through Persia in 1808 and 1809,”[121] but possibly it antedated that report. The statement is that the pearls of Ceylon peel off, while those of Persia are as “firm as the rock on which they grow”; and though they lose in color and luster one per cent. annually for fifty years, they still lose less than those of Ceylon, and at the expiration of the fifty years they cease to diminish in appearance. The pearl output in the Persian Gulf at the present time appears from the official returns to exceed four million dollars annually at local valuation. The exports in 1903 were reported at £827,447, and in 1904, £1,077,241. It is generally understood that all of the pearls are not entered in the official figures, and the valuations in the markets of Asia and Europe are greatly in excess of these amounts. The profits of the fishery are divided among a great number of persons. A large percentage goes to the shrewd _bunnias_ from India, who finance the fishery operations, and who, by all sorts of tricks connected with advances of supplies, valuation of the catch, etc., manage to make a very good thing out of the business. It is nothing unusual for the valuation of a lot of pearls to double and even treble after leaving the hands of the fishermen. While many of the gulf pearls—and especially of the small seed-pearls—go to Bagdad, the great bulk of them are sold to representatives of Hindu and Arab merchants of Bombay for shipment to that city, which to the Bahrein fisherman is the heart of the outside world. Few of the pearls go directly into Arabia or Persia, as the certain sale in the larger Bombay market is preferable to a sometimes higher but less regular price in other markets. Indeed, pearls may usually be purchased at a less cost in India than a stranger would be obliged to pay at Bahrein. The Bombay merchants “sow the earth with Orient pearl,” dealing direct with London, Paris and Berlin, and with the oriental jewelers. Most of the yellow pearls find oriental purchasers, with whose dark complexions they harmonize better than the silvery white ones. They are also more popular because of a belief existing throughout the East that they are less likely to lose their luster with the lapse of years.