His next exploits and explorations conducted from Karachi are sufficiently remarkable in themselves to place Masson quite at the head of the list of frontier explorers. He stands, indeed, in the same relation to the Indian borderland as Livingstone does to Africa. He first made a sea trip in Arab crafts up the Persian Gulf, visiting Muskat and obtaining a passage in a cruiser of the H.E.I. Company to Bushire. This we know from Major David Wilson's report to have been in 1830. It was then that he gave up the record of his previous travels, to which we have referred, and which he subsequently thought he had reason to regret. A month or two was passed at Tabriz, and a trip up the Tigris to Bagdad and Basrah. From Basrah he returned in a merchant vessel to Muskat, and finally made Karachi again in an Arab bagala. At Karachi he was not permitted to land, owing (as he suspected) to another party of Englishmen who were then attempting to explore the Indus. This turned out to be Captain Burnes' (afterwards Sir Alex. Burnes) party. The objection was based on a somewhat ridiculous notion of the capacity of the English to carry about regiments of soldiers concealed in _boxes_, and Masson subsequently learned that having no boxes with him, the opposition in his case had been withdrawn by the Amirs of Sind as tantamount to a breach of hospitality. However, for the time he was forced to return to Urmara on the Makran coast, from which place he hoped to reach Kalat. In this he was disappointed, but he found his way back to Sonmiani in an Arab dunghi (or bagala), which, with the monsoon wind at her back, was run in gallant style straight over the shallow bar into the harbour with hardly a foot of water below her. The practice of medicine was what sustained Masson at this period, but his reputation was slightly impaired by a crude prescription of sea water. A lady, too, who suffered from a disposition of her face to break out into white blotches, and who appealed for a remedy, was told that she would look much better all white. This again led to a lively controversy; but on the whole the practice of medicine was as useful to Masson as it has proved through all ages to explorers in all regions of the world.