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Don't overlook the fact that if someone is there to perform the ritual, someone is there to make it known to. LOL! Besides, regarding the Ethiopian man, I don't think that such a man would have been travelling alone.

So he got up and went. There was an Ethiopian man, a eunuch and high official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to worship in Jerusalem and was sitting in his chariot on his way home, reading the prophet Isaiah aloud. Acts 8:27-28, HCSB

Also consider how a primitive ritual, one which they joyful partook of, provided such an incredible insight for Peter and Paul to rightly declare. While we are a society of words, photos, and book knowledge, I am sure that our intellectually based viewpoints would be mostly meaningless to people who related life more in terms of nature and rituals. After all, consider the image of baptism:

Or are you unaware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? Therefore we were buried with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in a new way of life. For if we have been joined with Him in the likeness of His death, we will certainly also be in the likeness of His resurrection. Romans 6:3-5, HCSB

At its beginning, the ritual of baptism that accompanied faith in Christ not only pictured their being joined to Christ in his death and resurrection - and not just as an afterthought to be later revealed - but was partaken of in full realization as an identification with him. Paul took that universally regarded perception in order to drive home the amazing ramifications of what that identification really meant. In other words, he declared just how far being joined in both death and life was to be understood in Christ.

Jim :)