‘You read in books’, Suliman said to me; ‘our book is the sand’. In the course of many long and fascinating journeys with the Arabs in the Eastern desert of Egypt, not a day—hardly an hour—passed in which I did not witness their powers of observation or listen to their comments on the footprints of man or bird or animal beneath us in the sand. From childhood to the grave the ground at their feet is an ever-open book, the reading of which is second nature with them, a constant occupation of vital importance to their desert lives. What would they think of the recognition scene in the Choephori? The few paragraphs that follow, extracts from the journal I made of a threemonth walk with three or four men of the Ma'asa tribe in the summer of 1949, are a record of my conversations with two of them on this subject.