But it is not only the historical and legendary interest of this remarkable coast which renders it a fascinating subject for exploration and romance. The physical conditions of it, the bubbling mud volcanoes which occasionally fill the sea with yellow silt from below, and always remain in a perpetual simmer of boiling activity; the weird and fantastic forms assumed by the mud strata of recent sea-making, which are the basis of the whole structure of ridge and furrow which constitute Makran conformation, no less than the extraordinary prevalence of electric phenomena,--all these offered the Arabian Sea as a promising gift to the inventive faculty of such Arab genius as revelled in stories of miraculous enterprise. On a still, warm night when the stars are all ablaze overhead the sea will, of a sudden, spread around in a sheet of milky white, and the sky become black by contrast with the blackness of ink. Then again will there be a transformation to a bright scintillating floor, with each little wavelet dropping sparks of light upon it; and from the wake of the vessel will stretch out to the horizon a shining way, like a silver path into the great unknown. Meanwhile, the ship herself will be lit up by the electric genii. Each iron rod or stanchion will gleam with a weird white light; each spar will carry a little bunch of blue flame at its point; the mast-head will be aflame, and softly through the wonders of this strange Eastern sea the ship will stalk on in solemn silence and most "excellent loneliness." Small wonder that Arab mariners were stirring storytellers, living as they did amidst the uncounted wonders of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.