Dilam now is a poor place of perhaps two hundred houses, but there are a few well-to-do people in it who presently came out to pay us their respects. The English name is well known on the coast, and there was no danger now of any lack of courtesy. We were besieged at once with hospitable offers of entertainment for man and beast, but as usual preferred our camp outside the town. This we placed on a strip of sand dunes fronting the sea, and dividing it from the level plain which runs inland ten miles to the foot of the hills. This strip was scattered over with thorn bushes, in one of which a pair of cormorants were sitting. Our visitors remonstrated with us on choosing such a spot, assuring us that it was full of poisonous snakes, but this no doubt was nonsense. Among the rest came a wild-looking man with a gun, who told us he was a Beluch, and sent by the governor of Dilam as a guard, to protect us during the night. He had been in Turkish service, and was now in the Persian. This was our first meeting with anything Indian. We liked the man. In the evening, when it was dark and all were gone, Wilfrid gave himself the luxury of bathing in salt water.
We had now done what few if any Europeans had done before,—come all the way by land from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf: our journey had been over two thousand miles.
_April_ 24.—There was now a great debate whether we should go on still by land for the other hundred miles which remained to us before we could reach Bushire, or whether, selling our camels here at Dilam, we should hire a sefineh, or native boat, to convey us with our things by sea. Wilfrid was much taken with this last idea, thinking that the arrangement would save us from another week’s toil in the overwhelming heat; but to me the sight of the rickety boats in which we should have had to trust ourselves and our horses to the mercy of the winds and waves, was sufficient to make me rejoice that the negotiation about a sea journey failed. Then it was decided to march on as before. There seemed something sad, too, in abandoning our camels here, and taking to the ships of the sea where they could not follow us; and though we knew our parting from them was anyhow at hand, it was a respite to take them on. We had got, from our long care of them, to take great pride in their condition, and they were now fat and free from mange, a triumph of management which only those who have travelled far and loved their camels will understand.