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 numbers—they had five crews—and fought from stouter ships. Their boats were the halves of empty nutshells, each of which measured fifteen fathoms in length.

When we had lost them from sight, we attended to the wounded, and thereafter we kept under arms most of the time, always looking for attacks. And we did not look in vain. In fact, the sun had not yet gone down when from a desert island there came out against us about twenty men riding on huge dolphins, who were pirates like the others.. The dolphins carried them securely and plunged and neighed like horses. When they were close by, they separated and threw at us from both sides with dry cuttle-fish and crabs’ eyes. But when we let fly at them with spears and arrows, they could not hold their ground, but fled to the island, most of them wounded.

About midnight, while it was calm, we unexpectedly ran aground on an enormous kingfisher’s nest; really, it was sixty furlongs in circumference. The female was sailing on it, keeping her eggs warm, and she was not much smaller than the nest—in fact, as she started up she almost sunk the ship with the wind of her wings. She flew off, however, uttering a plaintive cry. We landed when day began to break, and observed that the nest was like a great raft, built of huge trees. There were five hundred eggs in it, every one of them bigger than a Chian wine-jar, and the chicks were already visible inside them and were chirping. We cut open one 345