In 1844 Dr Krapf allowed the population of Mombasah town, without its dependencies, to be 8000 to 10,000. In 1846 M. Guillain reduced it to 2500 or 3000 souls, not including a garrison of 250 men, but including 40 families of Arabs (220 to 230 souls), and 50 Banyans and Hindostani Moslems. In 1857 I was assured that it contained 8000 to 9000 souls, thus distributed: Arabs, about 350; 300 Baloch and other mercenaries, 50 Bhattias, 25 to 30 Indian Moslems, the rest being Wasawahili and the slave races. The Wasawahili are distributed into two great groups. Older and consequently nobler, though less numerous, are the Wamwita; they derive their origin from a Shirazi Shaykh whose name is locally forgotten. The other and far larger division is the Wakilindi-ni, who trace their name from Kilindi, whence they emigrated to Shungaya alias Shiraz, and eventually to Mombasah. Originally they occupied on the western shore of the island a separate settlement, which they called after their oldest homes; they built a tower of stone, surrounded it with a wall, provided it with wells, and thus rendered themselves independent of their patrons. Some remnants of eight other tribes, coast Arabs who had suffered from the invader, also colonized Mwita. Under the rule of the Portuguese an amalgamation took place, and the several races all became Wasawahili. The city is now governed by three Shaykhs—of the Arabs, of the Wamwita, and the Wakilindi-ni: they receive a small salary, and they communicate direct with Zanzibar, visiting the Island once a year. Justice is administered by three Kazis similarly chosen: the troops are under a Jemadar, and a Banyan sent by the farmer-general from head-quarters, manages the Custom House.

The Kisawahili spoken at Mombasah is purer than that of Zanzibar, the result of being nearer the fountain-head. Here the people can hardly articulate an initial ‘A:’ they must say, for instance Bdúlá, or as often Mdúlá, not Abdullah, and they supply a terminal vowel, as Shkúlá for School; the Hindostan man who shirks our double initial consonants would change it to ishkúl. The explosive sound of the B by forcibly closing the lips is given to the M, which becomes a perfect consonant having sound and continuance: before another consonant it creates in strangers’ ears the suspicion of being preceded by the original vowel-sound, and when following a vowel it is articulated as a final not as an initial consonant—M’áná-mke (a woman), for example, would be pronounced M’ánám-ke. The initial N also becomes before a consonant hard and explosive, and it sounds to the tyro as if a rapidly pronounced ‘I’ or ‘E’ were prefixed: Europeans, for instance, write Njia, ‘Endia.’ At Mombasah I heard the Arab ‘Hamzeh,’ or compression and contraction of the larynx, when a hiatus of two similar vowels occurs, as in Mcho’o (rain) and Tá’á (a lamp): in the dialects less pure the gap would be filled up by inserting the liquid R or L, as Mfuru for Mfu’u (the name of a tree). The Arabs and the more civilized tribes, I have remarked, prefer the R to the L, and say Rufu for Lufu, the Upper Pangani river, and so forth. The T also assumes the cerebral sound of the Sanskrit and that which renders the English dentals so hard to foreigners.

We found unexpectedly at Mvíta—the ‘Mombas Mission’ having been kindly received—a reception which could not be called friendly. Small communities are rarely remarkable for amiability, and these citizens are taxed by the rest of the coast-people with overweening pride, insolence of manner, bigotry and evil speaking, turbulence and treachery. They cannot forget their ancient glories, their hereditary chiefs who ruled like kings with Wazirs, Shayhks of tribes and Amirs or chief captains commanding hosts of savage warriors. Of course they regret the Mazara whom they themselves were the first to betray—they would betray them again and regret them again to-morrow. Like all ‘civilized’ Africans, they are not only treacherous and turbulent, but also inveterate thieves and pilferers: few travellers have failed to miss some valuable in the boat that lands them. Lies were plentiful as pronouns. Whilst some for their own purposes made very light of travel in the interior, others studiously exaggerated the expense, the difficulty, and the danger; and recounted the evils which had befallen Dr Krapf because he refused to take their advice. As I determined to disregard both, so they combined to regard us as rivals and enemies. They devoted all their energies to the task of spoiling us; and failing in that matter, they tried bullying: on one occasion I was obliged to administer, sword in hand, the descent down-stairs. The Jemadar Tangai, a gaunt Mekrani some 60 years old, and measuring 6 ft 2 in., insisted courteously upon supplying an escort, with the view of exchanging his worthless swords for our guns and revolvers: he could neither read nor write, but he was renowned for ‘’Akl,’ intellect, here synonymous with rascality. His son Mustafa brought a present of goats and fruit, for which he received the normal return-gift; he expected a little cloth, gunpowder, and a gold chronometer. We were visited by a certain Shafei Shaykh; by a Mombasah merchant, Jabir bin Abdullah el Rijebi, who seemed to think that men should speak in his presence with bated breath: he almost merited and he narrowly escaped being led out of the room by his ears. The very Hindus required a lesson of civility. We were on the best of terms with the Wali or Governor, Khalfan bin Ali el Bu Saídí, a fine specimen of the Arab gentlemen: he was on board when the Sayyid died, and he told us all the particulars of that event. But the manifest animus of the public was such as to make a residence at Mombasah by no means pleasant to us.

Considering the intense curiosity of civilized humanity to know something of its fellow-men in the state so-called of nature, of the savages which now represent our remote ancestors, I proceed to sketch the typical tribe of this part of Africa. My principal authority is M. Rebmann, who during nine years has made a conscientious study of the race, and who imparted his knowledge with the greatest courtesy.

The name ‘Wanyika’ means People of the Nyika,^[18] or wild land: it is useless, with M. G. de Bunsen, to identify their land with the Νίχωνος ὅρμος of the Periplus, as every wilderness is here called Nyika. Moreover, the name is not anciently known upon the coast: we read of the Wakilindi-ni and of the ‘Muzungulos,’ the plundering tribe which occupied the terra firma of Mombasah, and thus we may suspect the Wanyika to be a race which has emigrated from the interior since the middle of the 17th century. Their own tradition is that they were expelled by the Gallas from the lands lying N.N. West of Melinde. They occupy the highlands between S. lat. 3° and 5°, and they are bounded north by the Wataita, and south by the Wasumbara. Dr Krapf proposes for them a census of 50,000 to 60,000 souls, which appears greatly exaggerated. They are, as usual, divided into a multitude of clans, concerning which we know little but the names. Mulattoes of an early date, negroes mixed with Semitic blood and with a score of tribes, these East African families appear to have cast off in the course of ages the variety and irregularity of hybridism; moreover, if it be true that ‘the Semite is the flower of the negro race,’ the produce would hardly be properly called half-caste. Receiving for ages distinct impressions of the physical media around them, they have settled down into several and uniform national types: these, however, will not be detected by the unpractised eye. Many considerations argue them to be a degeneracy from civilized man rather than a people advancing towards cultivation. Their language attaches them to the great South African race, and some have believed in their ancient subjection to the Ethiopian or Kushite Empire. The historian of these lands, however, has to grope through the glooms of the past, guided only by the power to avail himself of the dimmest present lights. I vehemently doubt, moreover, the antiquity of maritime races in Tropical Africa—a subject which has been discussed in my sundry studies of the Western Coast. A case in point is the latest move of the pastoral Wamasai.

Physically the Wanyika race is not inferior to other negroids, nor degraded as is the Congo negro. Like the Galla and the Somal, the skull is pyramido-oval, flattened and depressed at the moral region of the phrenologist—a persistent form amongst savages and barbarians—and straight or ‘wall-sided’ above the ears, a shape common both to ‘Semite’ and negro. The features are ‘Hamitic’ only from the eyes downwards: the brow is moderately high, broad, and conical; the orbits are tolerably distant; the face is somewhat broad and plain, with well-developed zygomata; the nose is depressed with patulated nostrils, coarse and ill-turned; the lips are bordés, fleshy and swelling, and the jaw is distinctly prognathous. The beard is scant; the hair, which though wiry, yet grows comparatively long, is shaved off the forehead from ear to ear, and hangs down in the thinnest of corkscrews, stiffened with fat. The skin is soft, but the effluvium is distinctly African; the colour is chocolate-brown and rarely black, unless the mother be a slave from the South. The figure is, like the features, Semitic above and negrotic below. The head is well seated upon broad shoulders; the chest is ample, and the stomach, except in early boyhood or in old age, does not protrude or depend. But the bunchy calf is placed near the ham; the shin-bone bends forward, and the foot is large, flat, and lark-heeled. Nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between form and face in the woman-kind: upon the lower limbs, especially the haunches, of the Medicean Venus a hideous ape-like phiz meets the disappointed eye: above hangs a flaccid bosom, below

There is not, as amongst the Hottentots, that exaggeration of the steatopyga which assimilates the South African man to his ovines: the subcutaneous fat overlying the gluteian muscles and their adjacents, forms in early life a cushion rather ornamental than otherwise. Young men often show a curious little crupper which gives a whimsical appearance to the posterior surface—I have observed this also amongst the Somal. The favourite standing position is cross-legged, a posture unknown to Europe; sometimes the sole of one foot is applied to the ankle or to the knee of the other leg: the gait—no two nations walk exactly alike—is half-stride, half-lounge. Eyes wild and staring, abrupt gestures, harsh, loud, and barking voices, still evidence the ignoble savage.

The Wanyika afford a curious study of rudimental mind. A nation of semi-naturals as regards moral and intellectual matters, their ideas are all in confusion. To the incapacity of childhood they unite the hard-headedness of age, and with the germs of thought that make a Bacon or a Shakespeare they combine an utter incapability of developing them. Their religion is of the ‘small’ category, the large being Brahmanism and Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and El Islam, the first active Reformation of its predecessor, and the triumph of Arianism over Athanasianism. The system is that of a ‘Gentile worshipping nothing,’ yet feeling instinctively that there is a Something above or beyond him. It is the vain terror of our childhood rudely systematized, the earliest dawn of faith, a creation of fear which ignores love. Thus they have not, in our sense of the words, God or devil,^[19] heaven or hell, soul or spirit.

‘Mulungu’ is the Mnyika’s synonym of the Kafir Umdali, Uhlanga, and Unkulumkulu, the Morungo of Tete, the Unghorray of Madagascar, and the Omakuru of the Damaras. Amongst the most advanced tribes it denotes a vague kind of God: here it means any good or evil ghost, especially of a Pagan. The haunting Moslem is distinguished as P’hepo, the plural of Upepo (a whirlwind, or ‘devil,’ generally called Chamchera). As amongst all Fetish worshippers, the evestrum which they call Koma—pronounced like Goma—meaning etymologically ‘one departed,’ is a subject of horror; but of the dead they say Yuzi sira—he is ended. They cannot comprehend a future state, yet they place sheep and goats, poultry and palm wine, upon the tombs of their dead. It is a modern European error (Rev. Mr J. P. Schön and Rev. Mr Sam. Crowther) to suppose that drops of liquor spilt, as by the Brass men, in honour of the old people (ancestors), food-offerings at graves, and fires lighted there on cold wet nights, evidence the European’s, the East African’s,^[20] or the American’s belief in futurity: as the act proves it is a belief in presentity, and after a few years the ceremony showing ‘a continuation of relationship between the living and the dead’dead’, is always disused. Savages cannot separate the idea of an immortal soul from a mortal body: can we wonder at this when the wisest of the civilized have not yet agreed upon the subject? The characteristic of the venerative faculty amongst savages and barbarians is ever irreverence: they cannot raise themselves to the idea of a Deity, and they blaspheme as if speaking of a man and an enemy. The Wanyika horrify the Moslems by their free language concerning Allah. So King Radáma I. of Madagascar, a comparatively civilized man, who attempted to regulate his forces upon a European pattern, was in the habit of firing guns during storms; he declared that the two deities were answering one another—the God above speaking by thunder and lightning, the god below by cannon and powder. Yet he could anticipate the Bon Général Janvier by General Tazo, the swamp-fever, who he declared was his best aid against the French invader. Something of this irreverence is remarkable in the character of Richard Cœur de Lion.

The Wanyika thus hold, with our philosophers, that the Koma is a subjective, not an objective, existence; and yet ghost-craft is still the only article of their creed. All their diseases arise from possession, and no man dies what we should term a natural death. Their rites are intended either to avert evils from themselves or to cast them upon others, and the primum mobile of their sacrifices is the interest of the Mganga, or Medicine-man. When the critical moment has arrived, the ghost, being adjured to come forth from the possessed one, names some article, technically called a Kehi, or chair, in which, if worn round the neck or limbs, it will reside without annoying the wearer. This idea lies at the bottom of many superstitious practices: this negro approach to a ‘sympathetic cure’ is the object of the leopard’s claw, of the strings of white, black, and blue beads, called Mdugu ga Mulungu (ghost-beads), worn over the shoulder, and of the rags taken from the sick man’s body, and hung or fastened to what Europeans call the ‘Devil’s Tree.’ The ‘Kehi’ is preferred by the demon-ghost to the patient’s person, and thus by mutual agreement both are happy. Some, especially women, have a dozen haunters, each with its peculiar charm: one of them is called, ridiculously enough, ‘Barakat,’ in Arabic ‘a blessing,’ and the P.N. of the Æthiopian slave inherited by Mohammed.

It has not suited the Moslem’s purpose to proselytize the Wanyika, who doubtless, like their kinsmen the Wasawahili, would have adopted the Saving Faith. As it is, the Doruma tribe has been partly converted, and many of the heathen keep the Ramazan fast, feeling themselves raised in the scale of creation by doing something more than their pagan brethren. The ceremonies are the simplest contrivances of savage priestcraft. Births are not celebrated, and the weakly or deformed infant is at once strangled: it is a failure, and as such it is put away. Children become the property of the mother, or rather of her brother, to be disposed of as he pleases: the only one who has no voice in the matter is the putative father. Circumcision, an old African custom extending from Egypt to the Cape, and adopted from the negroid by the Hebrews, is a semi-religious act performed once every five or six years upon the youths en masse, and accompanied by the usual eating and drinking, drumming and dancing. A man may marry any number of wives; the genial rite, however, is no tie to these fickle souls: it is celebrated by jollifications, and it is broken as merrily.

The principal festivities, if they can be so called, are funerals: the object is to ‘break the fear’ (Ussa kiwewe) of death, an event which, savage-like, they regard with a nameless dread, an inexpressible horror. For a whole week the relations of the deceased must abstain from business, however urgent, and ruin themselves by killing cattle and broaching palm-wine for the whole community. At these times there is a laxity of morals, which recalls to mind the orgies of the classical Adonia, and refusal to lavish wealth upon the obsequies of relations is visited with tauntings and heavy fines.

A characteristic of Wanyika customs is the division of both sexes into distinct bodies, with initiatory rites resembling masonic degrees. The orders are three, not four as in India, Persia, and ancient Greece; and traces of such organization, founded as it is upon the ages of man, may be found in many communities of negroes and negroids. The Kru Republic, for instance, a pure democracy, flourishing close to the despotisms of Ashanti and Dahome, makes a triple division of its citizens: the Kedibo, or juveniles; the Sedebo, or soldiers (adults); and the Gnekbadi, elders and censors. The southern Gallas appear to be divided into ‘Toibs,’ or officers; the ‘Ghaba,’ adult warriors, who wear four Gútu or pigtails, projecting at right angles from the poll; and the ‘Ari,’ cadets or aspirants, who have a right to only two. The Wakwafi have the El Moran, warriors, young men who live with their fathers; the Ekieko, married men; and the Elkijaro or Elkimirisho, elders. The Wanyika split into the Nyere, or young; the Khambi, or middle-aged; and the Mfaya, or old. Each degree has its different initiation and ceremonies, with an ‘elaborate system of social and legal observances,’ the junior order always buying promotion from the senior. Once about every twenty years comes the great festival ‘Unyaro,’ at which the middle-aged degree is conferred. This (1857) is Unyaro-year; but the Wamasai hindered the rite. Candidates retire to the woods for a fortnight, and clay themselves for the first half with white, and during the second with red earth; a slave is sacrificed, and the slaughter is accompanied by sundry mysteries, of which my informants could learn nothing. When all the Khambi have been raised to the highest rank, the Mfaya, these, formerly the elders, return, socially, to a second childhood; they are once more Nyere, or (old) boys, and there is no future promotion for them. After the clay-coatings and the bloody sacrifice, the chief distinctions of the orders are their religious utensils. Tor instance, the Muansa (plural Miansa) drum, a goat-skin stretched upon a hollowed tree-trunk, six feet long, whose booming, drawn-out sounds, heard at night amongst the wild forested hills, resembles the most melancholy moaning, is peculiar to the third degree or elders of both sexes. It is brought during the dark hours to the Kaya, and the junior orders may not look upon it. Similarly, the women have earthenware drums, which are concealed from the men. El Idrisi (1st climate, 2nd section) had heard that the people of El Banes, 150 Arab miles by sea from Manisa or Mombasah, adored a drum called Esrahim. It was covered with skin only at one end, and was suspended by a cord to be beaten; the result was a frightful sound, heard at the distance of a league.

Languor and apathy are here at once the gifts of the media or climate, and the heritage of the race: moreover, man in these lands, wanting little, works less. Two great classes, indeed, seem everywhere to make of life one long holiday—the civilized rich, who have all things, and the savage, who possesses almost nothing. Yet is the Mnyika, and indeed mostly the wild man, greedy of gain—alieni appetens, sui pro-fusus—perfectly dishonest in quest of lucre, and not to be bound by honour or oath, as he is reckless, wasteful, and improvident. Like their neighbour-nations in this part of Africa, these people are instinctively and essentially thieves. They never go to war; agriculture, commerce, and a settled life have enervated them into pusillanimity without supplying superior knowledge for offence or even for defence. They scratch the ground with their little hoes; they wander about after their few cows and goats; they sit dozing or chatting in the sun or before a fire; and they spend hours squatting round an old pit till water collects, rather than sink it a few feet. Thus they idle away three days, and they rest from non-labour on the fourth, called Juna, from Jum’a the Moslem ‘sabbath.’ This, as amongst the Dahomans and other African tribes, is their week. Spare time is passed mostly in drunkenness, induced by Tembo or palm-wine, and with stronger liquors, when they can get them. They begin the potations early in the morning, and after midday they are seldom sober, except for want of material. The tom-tom is hardly ever silent: as amongst the Somal and the Wasawahili, it sounds at all times, seasons, and occasions: and they dance, accompanying themselves with loud cries, even to expel the bad ghost from the body of a bewitched friend. They have also the Dahoman rattle, an empty gourd or cocoa-nut, filled with pebbles and provided with a handle: this is the celebrated ‘Tamaraka’ idol worshipped by the Tupy-Guarani tribes, between the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio de la Plata. The music is simple, and they are contented to recitative for the live-long night such merum nectar as—

This reminds us of the Histoire d’un bouton and the magical Teutonic refrain—

arguing, says the witty author, so deep a devotion to that art which hath power to soothe the savage breast. With time and tune well developed, but wholly wanting in initiative, the wild men easily learned music from the missionaries; yet they have always preferred their own meaningless declamation. Of course the Kinyika is an illiterate language.

The policy of the Wanyika is a rude and lawless liberty, equality, fraternity. None commands where none obeys: consequently there is no ‘temperamentum of chief,’ no combination, and no possible improvement. The headman plies his hoe, like the serf, in his little plot of maize or manioc; and the clans will not unite even to protect life. Causes are decided by a council of elders, according to the great African code—ancient custom. The chief of the five Shaykhs is he of Rabai Mku; but even he dare not arrogate to himself any authority. Pilfering is common, robbing is rare; and a man caught in the act of stealing is chastised by the proprietor with sword or bow. Adultery is punished by the fine of a cow and abundance of liquor. The murderer is more often mulcted than handed over for death to the family of the slain; and little is said concerning the slaughter of a slave. Divided into half-a-dozen sub-tribes, each barely sufficient to stock an English village, these savages find petty political jealousies and intrigues as necessary and as ready to hand as do the highly civilized.

The Wanyika readily attended the European schools as long as these were a novelty; presently, with the characteristic African levity and inconsequence, they grew weary of application, and they dubbed all who so exerted themselves Wazingu, or fools. Yet in one point they are an anomaly. They possess, in a high degree, the gift of many negro and negroid races, an unstudied eloquence which the civilized speaker might envy, and which, like poetry, seems to flourish most in the dawn of civilization. To see, says a Brazilian author, men so eloquent and so badly governed does not suggest that public speaking in the virility of civilization is a great ruling power. Their unpremeditated speech rolls like a torrent; every limb takes its part in the great work of persuasion, and the peculiar rhythm of their copious dialect, favourable to such displays of oratory, forms an effective combination. Few, however, can ‘follow the words,’ that is to say, answer in due order the heads of an opponent’s speech. Such power of memory and logical faculty is not in them. The abuse of the gift of language makes them boisterous in conversation, unable to keep silence—the negro race is ever loquacious—and addicted to ‘bending their tongues like their bows for lies.’ They cannot even, to use a Zanzibar German merchant’s phrase, ‘lie honestly.’ Their character may thus be briefly summed up: a futile race of barbarians, drunken and immoral; cowardly and destructive; boisterous and loquacious; indolent, greedy, and thriftless. Their redeeming points are, a tender love of family, which displays itself by the most violent ‘kin-grief,’ and a strong attachment to an uninviting home.

A certain critic, who had probably never transgressed the bounds of Europe, but who probably had read Macaulay (‘by judicious selection and previous exaggeration, the intellect and the disposition of any human being might be described as being made up of nothing but startling contrasts’), thus complained of my description of Somal inconsistency. ‘This affectionately-atrocious people,’ he declares, ‘is painted in strangely opposite colours.’ Can we not, then, conceive the high development of destructiveness and adhesiveness, to speak phrenologically, combining in the same individual? And are not the peasantry of Connaught a familiar instance of the phenomenon? Such is the negro’s innate destructiveness, that I have rarely seen him drop or break an article without a loud burst of laughter. During fires at Zanzibar he appears like a fiend, waving brands over his head, dancing with delight, and spreading the flames, as much from instinct as with the object of plunder. On the other hand, he will lose his senses with grief for the death of near relatives: I have known several men who remained in this state for years. But why enlarge upon what is apparent to the most superficial observer’s eye?

The male dress is a tanned skin or a cotton cloth tied round the waist, strips of hairy cowhide are bound like garters, or the ‘hibás’ of the Bedawin Arabs, below the knee, and ostrich and other feathers are stuck in the tufty poll. The ornaments are earrings of brass or iron wire, and small metal chains: around the neck and shoulders, arms and ankles, hang beads, leather talisman-cases, and ‘ghost-chairs’—the latter usually some article difficult to obtain, for instance, a leopard’s claw. Those near the seaboard have ceased to extract one or more of the lower incisors—a custom whose object was probably the facilitating of expectoration—and they now rarely tattoo, saying, ‘Why should we spoil our bodies?’ They have abandoned the decoration to women, who raise the cutis with a long sharp thorn, prick it with a knife-point, and wash the wounds with red ochre and water. Abroad the Mnyika carries his bow and long skin-quiver full of reed arrows, tipped with iron or hard wood, and poisoned by means of some bulbous root: his shield is a flat strip of cowhide doubled or trebled. He has also a spear, a knife at his waist for cutting cocoa-nuts, a Rungu or knobstick in his girdle behind, and a long sword, half sheathed, and sharpened near the point. He hangs round his neck a gourd sneeze-mull, containing powdered tobacco with fragrant herbs and dried plantain-flower. On journeys he holds a long thin staff surmounted by a little cross, which serves to churn his blood and milk, a common article of diet in East Africa—similarly, the Lapps bleed their reindeer. He also slings to his back a dwarf three-legged stool, cut out of a single block of hard wood. In the ‘Reise auf dem Weissen Nil’ (p. 32), extracted from the Vicar-General Knoblecher’s Journals, we read of the chief Nighila and his followers carrying stools of tree-stumps, ornamented with glass-ware. The other approximations of custom, character, and climate between the North Equatorial basin of the White River (Nile) and the coast of Eastern Intertropical Africa are exceedingly interesting.

The costume of the Domus Aurea and Rosa Mystica is as simple: a skin or a cloth round the loins, another veiling the bosom, and in some cases a Marinda or broad lappet of woven beads, like the Coëoo of Guiana, falling in front, with a second of wider dimensions behind. A flat ruff of thick brass wire encircles the throat, making the head appear as in a barber’s dish; white and red beads, or the scarlet beans of the Abrus tree, form the earrings and necklace, bracelets and anklets, whilst a polished coil of brass wire, wound round a few inches of the leg below the knee, sets off the magnificent proportions of the limb. Young girls wear long hair, and the bold bairn takes his bow and arrows before thinking of a waist-cloth.

The Wanyika are a slave importing tribe: they prefer the darker women of the South to, and they treat them better than, their own wives. Children are sold, as in India, only if famine compels, and all have the usual hatred of slave merchants, the ‘sellers of men.’ When a certain Ali bin Nasir was Governor of Mombasah he took advantage of a scarcity to feed the starving Wanyika with grain from the public depôts. He was careful, however, to secure, as pledges of repayment, the wives and children of his debtors, and these becoming insolvent, he sold off the whole deposit. Such a transaction was little suspected by our acute countrymen, when, to honour enlightened beneficence, they welcomed with all the plaudits of Exeter Hall, ‘that enlightened Arab statesman, His Excellency Ali bin Nasir, Envoy Extraordinary of H.M. the Imam of Muscat, to the Court of H. B. Majesty;’ presented him with costly specimens of geology, and gold chronometers; entertained him at the public expense, and sent him from Aden to Zanzibar in the Hon. East India Company’s brig of war, Tigris. This Oriental votary of free trade came to a merited bad end. He was one of the prisoners taken by the doughty B’ana Mtakha of Sewi, where the late Sayyid’s ill-starved and worse-managed force was destroyed by the Bajuni spear. Recognized by the vengeful savages, he saw his sons expire in torments; he was terribly mutilated, and at last he was put to death with all the refinements of cruelty. And he deserved his fate.

The Wanyika consider service, like slavery, a dishonour: they have also some food prejudices which render them troublesome to Europeans, and those who live amongst them are obliged to engage Moslem menials. As regards the success of the ‘Mombas Mission,’ which was established in 1846, and upon which a large sum of money has been expended, the less said the better. Dr Krapf had started with the magnificent but visionary scheme of an ‘Apostle’s Street,’ a chain of mission posts stretching across Africa from sea to sea: he never, however, made converts enough to stock a single house. Those unacquainted with savage life would think it an easy task to overthrow the loose fabric of wild superstitions, and to raise upon its ruins a structure, rude, but still of higher type. Practically, the reverse is the case. The Wanyika, for instance, are so bound and chained by Adá, or custom, that inevitable public opinion, whose tyranny will not permit a man to sow his lands when he pleases; so daunted and cowed by the horrors of their faith; so thoroughly conservative in the worst sense of the word, and so enmeshed by tribal practices, of which not the least important is their triple initiation, that the slave of rule and precedent lacks power to set himself free. We may easily understand this. Religion is the mental expression of a race, and it cannot advance in purity without a correspondent intellectual improvement on the part of its votaries. On the other hand, not a few nations, especially in the dawn of civilization, have risen despite their follies of faith: but these are peoples who have within them the germs of progress. Judaism did not make the Falasha of East Africa, nor the remote colonists of Southern Arabia, an intellectual people: the Jews of Aden, to this day, show no traces of mental superiority over their neighbours. Christianity has done nothing for Abyssinia or Egypt: these lands are inhabited by peoples which have remained as nearly stationary as it is possible for human nature. Nowhere, indeed, has ‘the Church’ proved herself in the long course of ages a more complete and hopeless failure than in her own birthplace, and in her peculiar ethnic centre, Syria. Here the Marronites are in no ways superior, and in many points, such as courage and personal dignity, inferior to their neighbours, the Metawali, who have a debased religion, and the Druzes, who have none. El Islam, also, has not much to boast of on the coasts of Guinea and of Zanzibar, except that it has abolished certain abominations such as witch-killing, twin-murder, and poison ordeals, of which many have been practised in semi-civilized Europe and Asia. When, therefore, we tell the world that the Bible made England or the Koran Stambul, we merely assist in propagating a fallacy.

Not a head of game, not a hippopotamus, was to be found near Mombasah. We finished our geographical inquiries; shook hands with divers acquaintances; re-shipped, after sundry little difficulties, on board the Riami; and on the 24th of January we left the turbulent island with gladdened hearts. The accidents of voyage now turned in our favour: there was a bright fresh breeze and a counter-current running southward thirty or thirty-five miles a day. After 6 hours of drowsy morning sailing, Ra’as Tewi, a picturesque headland, hove in sight, and two hours more brought the Riami to anchor at Sandy Point, in Gasi (جاسى) Bay. It lies half-way \[Arabic] between Mombasah and Wasin Island, and the position is correctly laid down in the ‘Mission Map.’^[21] It is a mere roadstead, without other protection against the long sweep and swell of the Indian Ocean than a few scattered ‘washes,’ and a coralline islet. The settlement lies at some distance from the shore, deep-bosomed in trees, behind a tall screen of verdant mangrove; only the nodding cocoa, sure indicator of man’s presence in East Africa, towering high over the plebeian underwood, betrays its position to the mariner. The large village of wattle and dab huts is inhabited, like Mtuapa and Takaungu, by remnants of the proud Mazrui irreconcileables, still self-exiled from Mombasah. They live under the Shaykh Abdullah bin Khamis, and a sister of Shaykh Mubarak of Mombasah, who is said to display peculiar energy. They have given refuge to fugitive slaves from Marka, and behind the coast-line they have founded a new settlement, Mwasagnombe. It is not improbable that, in common with their brethren established in other villages, they look forward to recovering Mombasah, their old appanage.

Gasi is surrounded by plantations, and the Arabs, unmolested by the Wadigo savages, to whom the fertile land belongs, live in comparative comfort. Our crew armed themselves to accompany my companion, who, despite the bad name of the people, was civilly received on shore, with sundry refreshments of cocoa-nut milk and cake of rasped pulp and rice-flour. The footprints of a small lion appeared upon the sands, but we were not young enough to undertake the fruitless toil of tracking it. This was the breeding season, as the frequent birds’-nests proved. Ensued a cool, breezy night on board the Riami, the thermometer showing 75° (F.). Our gallant captain, the melancholist, sat up till dawn, chatting with Said bin Salim, who trembled at the sound of scattered washes, and at the wind moaning over the coral bank and through the barren ‘forests of the sea.’

About sunrise we again made sail, and, guided by that excellent landmark, the Peaks of Wasin, whose height is in charts 2500 feet, we entered, after three hours, the narrow channel, with never less than 5 fathoms of water, which, running nearly due east and west, separates Wasin Island from the continent. The north of this coralline bank, an ‘insula opaca,’ about 2¼ miles long by 1 in breadth, is defended by sundry outlying ledges and diminutive cliffs, where the gulls and terns take refuge, and upon which the combing sea breaks its force. The low southern shore is rich in the gifts of floatsom and jetsom; here the tide, flowing amongst the mangrove fringes and under shady crags, forms little bays, by no means unpicturesque. To windward, or south, lies the Wasin Bank, with three or four plateaux of tree-tufted rock emerging a few feet above sea-level.

The Island, which does a little cultivation, belongs to Zanzibar, and the only settlement, about the centre of its length, is on the northern shore, fronting Wanga Bandar on the Continent. Wasin contains three Mosques, long flat-roofed rooms of coral rag and lime ranged obliquely to face Meccah, and scattered amongst little huts and large houses of ‘bordi’ or mangrove timber: the latter are tied with coir rope and plastered over with clay, which in rare cases is whitewashed. The sloping thatch-roof already approaches in size and in sharpness of pitch the disproportions of the Madagascar cottage. Huge calabashes extend their fleshy arms over the hovels, affording the favourite luxury of a cool lounge, and giving from afar a something of pleasant village aspect to the squalid settlement. Water must be brought from the mainland; the people own it to be brackish, but declare that it is not unwholesome. The climate is infamous for breeding fever and helcoma, the air being poisoned by cowries festering under a tropical sun, and by two large graveyards—here also, as at Zanzibar, the abodes of the dead are built amongst the habitations of the living. The population is a bigoted and low-minded race, Hassádin (envious fellows) of evil eye, say the Zanzibarians; a mixture of lymphatic Arabs, hideous Wasawahili, ignoble half-castes, and thievish slaves. The Sayyid maintains no garrison here; the Banyans have been forbidden to deal in cowries, and the native merchants have all the profits such as they are.

I could hear nothing of Mr Cooley’s ‘tribe named Masimba, on the coast at Wassína (Wasin Island), near Mombasa,’ a term which he translates ‘lions,’ and identifies with the Zimba invaders of Do Couto. There is, however, a district of that name between Wasin and Gasi; and it may be connected with the range crossed by M. Rebmann, in 1847, and usually written Shimba. In the interior the word Masimba is used when addressing man or woman, and the root appears to be identical with that of the Vazimba or aborigines of Ankova. The people of Wasin send caravans of 100 men to the interior, viâ Wanga Bandar. They set out about the end of February, make some 20 marches, and return with ivory and slaves after about four months.

Landing, we found the shore crowded with unarmed spectators, who did not even return our salams: we resolved in future to reserve such greetings for those who deserve them. After sitting half an hour in a mat-shed, redolent with drying cowries and dignified with the name of Furzeh, or Custom House, presided over by a young Bohrah from Cutch, we were civilly accosted by an old man, whose round head showed him to be a Hindostani. Abd el Karim led us to his house, seated us in chairs upon the terrace, and mixed for us a cooling sherbet in a kind of one-handled blue and white vase, not usually, in Europe at least, devoted to such purpose. The Riami discharging cargo, we walked into the jungle, followed by a ragged tail of men and boys, to inspect some old Portuguese wells: as we traversed the village all the women fled—a proof that El Islam here flourishes. This part of the island is thinly veiled with a red argillaceous soil which produces a thick and matted growth of thorny plants, creepers, and parasites: eastward, where the mould is deeper, there is richer vegetation, and a few stunted cocoas have taken root. After fighting through the jungle, we came upon two pits sunk in the soft rock: Said bin Salim was bitterly derided whilst he sounded the depth, 40 feet; and by way of revenge, I dropped a hint about buried gold, which has doubtless been the cause of aching arms and hearts to the churls of Wasin. There is no game on the Island or on the main: in the evening, after a warm bath amongst the mangroves, we left the dirty hole without a shade of regret.

The coast is here concealed by the usual thickset hedge of verdure, above which nod the tufts of straggling palms: its background is the rocky purple wall of Bondei—Capt. Owen’s ‘Sheemba Range of Hills, about 1500 feet high’—here and there broken by tall blue cones. After 1 h. 30 min. we sighted Wanga Bandar, where the land was smoking; this place has rarely the honour of appearing in maps. The environs belong to the Wadigo, amongst whom Said bin Salim lost a slave-girl: she had gone on leave of absence to her tribe, and though she never returned, he received from her an annual remittance of a dollar. These people, who are divided into half-a-dozen clans, occupy a fine high country which extends westward to Usumbara: they dwell in large villages, fenced to keep out the Wamasai, and they are agriculturists, fond of Jete, or public markets, at which they dispose of their grain to the coast-traders. Those whom we saw were poor-looking men: their bows were well turned and bent, with brass knobs and strings of cowgut; the notched and neatly feathered arrows had triangular iron piles. The women, who veiled the bosom, were remarkably plain, and apparently had never seen a European. These Wadigo with their southern neighbours, the Wasegeju, are porters of the inland traffic. Caravans, if they may so be called, numbering sometimes a hundred men, slaves included, set out at the beginning of the rains in March or April, from Wanga and other little ‘Bandars’ on the coast. If the capital be $1000, they distribute it into $400 of beads, and brass and iron wires (Nos. 7 and 8), with $400 of American domestics and cotton-stuff’s of sorts: the remainder serves to pay 40 porters, who each receive $10 per trip, half before starting and the rest upon return. After twenty days’ march, these trading parties arrive at Umasai and the adjacent countries; they remain there bartering for three or four months, and then march back laden with ivory and driving a few slaves purchased en route.

Our Nakhoda again showed symptoms of ‘dodging:’ he had been allowed to ship cargo from Mombasah to Wasin, and thereupon he founded a claim or rather a right to carry goods from Wasin to Tanga. Unable to disabuse his mind by mild proceedings, I threatened to cut the cable, and thus once more, the will of Japhet prevailing over that of Shem, we succeeded about 1 P.M., not without aid from an Omani craft, in hauling up our ground-tackle. The old Riami, groaning in every rib, flirted with some reefs, and floated into the open sea, whose combing waves were foaming under a stiff N. Easter. As we sped merrily along Said bin Salim busied himself in calculating the time it would take to round the several promontories. But when the water smoothened under the lee of Pemba Island he became bold enough to quote these martial lines:—

After two hours of brisk sailing, we lay abreast of a headland called by our crew Kwala (Chala Point of the Hydrographic Map), bounding the deep inlet and outlying islets of Jongolia-ni or Chongolia-ni. Approaching the gape of Tanga Bay, he shortened sail, or we might have made it at 4 P.M.: the entrance, however, is intricate; we had no pilot, and the crew preferred hobbling in under a bit of artemon or foresail, which they took a good hour to hoist. At sunset, having threaded the ‘Bab’ or narrow rock-bound passage which separates Ra’as Rashid, the northern mainland-spit, a precipitous bluff some 20 feet high, from the head of Tanga Islet, we glided into the smooth bay, and anchored in three fathoms, opposite and about half a mile from the town, which is known by the cocoas and calabashes crowning the ridge.

Tanga Bay is placed by Captain Owen in S. lat. 4° 35′, or five miles N. of Wasin Island, and thus the positions of the whole Coast are thrown out.^[22] It is in S. lat. 5°; South of Wasin, and between that place and the mouth of the Panga-ni river. This extraordinary error can have been made only by a confusion of the survey-sheets, and it appears the more singular in a work of such correctness. The inlet, called probably from its shape, Tanga, the sail, or kilt, is five miles deep by four broad, and the entrance is partially barred by a coralline bank, the site of the ancient Arab settlement. Tanga Islet, a lump of green, still contains a scatter of huts, and a small square stone Gurayza (fort), whose single gun lies dismounted: it is well wooded, but the water obtained by digging pits in the sand is scarcely potable. As a breakwater it is imperfect during the N. East trades: when a high sea rolls up ships must anchor under the mainland, and when the S. West monsoon blows home it is almost impossible to leave the harbour without accident. The bay, embanked with abundant verdure and surrounded by little settlements, receives the contents of two fresh-water streamlets: westward (311°) is the Mtofu, and N. of it (355°) the Mto Mvo-ni^[23] or Kiboko-ni—Hippopotamus river. The latter at several miles distant from its mouth must be crossed in a ferry; it affords sweet water, but the people of Tanga prefer scratching into their sand to the trouble of fetching the pure element. The ‘Kiboko’ is found in small numbers at the embouchures of these islands, and often within a few yards of where the boys bathed. I defer an account of our sport till we meet that unamiable pachyderm upon the Panga-ni river.

Like all the towns of the ‘Mrima’ proper, which here, I have said, begins, Tanga is a patch of thatched pent-roofed huts, built upon a bank overlooking the sea in a straggling grove of cocoa and calabash. The population is laid down at 4000 to 5000 souls, including 20 Banyans and 15 Baloch, with the customary consumptive Jemadar. The citizens are chiefly occupied with commerce, and they send twice a year in May to June and in October to November, after the Great and Little Rains, trading parties to Chaga and Umasai. At such times they find on the way an abundance of water: the land, however, supplies no food. From Tanga to Mhina-ni (the place of Mhina, Henna, or the P.N. of man, in Herr Petermann’s Map ‘Mikihani,’ and in Mr Wakefield Mihináni), on the Upper Panga-ni river, passing between Mbaramo and Pare, are 13 marches: here the road divides, one branch leading northward to Chaga, the other westward across the river to the Wamasai’s country. The total would be 15 stages, at least 20 days for men carrying^[24] merchandise. These caravans are seldom short of 400 to 500 men, Arabs and Wasawahili, Pagazi or free porters who carry 50 lbs. each, and slaves. The imports are chiefly cotton-stuffs, iron wires (Senyenge), brass wires (Másángo), and beads, of which some 400 varieties are current in these countries. The usual return consists chiefly of ivory, per annum about 70,000 lbs., we were told—a quantity hardly credible. I heard of some gold dust from Umasai being sent as a specimen to Sayyid Mayed: they bring also a few slaves, some small mangey camels, and half-wild asses.^[25] The citizens trade with the coast-savages, and manufacture, from imported iron, billhooks and hard wares for the Wasegeju. This tribe, once powerful, now uninfluential, preserves a tradition that when expelled with the Wasawahili from Shungaya by the Gallas, it migrated to the River Ozi or Dana (Zana), to the Bay of Kilifi, and finally to Wanga and Tanga. The dialect, they say, is similar to that of the Pokomo of the Dana, hence probably Mr Guillain (i. 402) declares them to have been indigens of the coast about Melinde. Still a violent, warlike, and furious brood, as described by Do Couto (Decad. xi. chap. xxi.), they hunt the Bondei Hills for slaves, and of late years, having sundry blood-feuds with their neighbours the Wadigo, they have sought the protection of King Kimwere and of the Wazegura race south of the Panga-ni river. Tanga has for some time since been spared the mortification of the Wamasai, who in this vicinity have driven and harried many a herd. I here saw two of their women, veritable human Cynocephali, flat-headed, with receding brows à la Robespierre, eyes close together, long low noses with open nostrils, projecting muzzles, and ears in strips. The land is now, comparatively speaking, thickly inhabited, and dotted with flourishing villages, Mvo-ni, Ambo-ni, Janja-ni, and others.

The only modern tribe which figures in the history of the coast is the Wasegeju. We first read of them in 1589, when the Zimba or Wazimba Kafirs, who had devastated the dependencies of Tete and Rios de Sena, on the Zambeze, swarmed northwards, massacring, and, it is said, devouring, all who opposed them between Kilwa and Mombasah. After destroying Kilwa, where they are reported to have killed and eaten 3000 Moors, men and women, they appeared upon the seaboard opposite Mombasah, whilst Thomé de Souza Coutinho was attacking the rebellious city in which the Corsair Ali Bey had taken refuge. The savages sided with the Portuguese, crossed the ford, and fell upon the townspeople with assegai and arrow. The citizens fled, preferring to face the sword and the musket of the Christian invader. After this the Zimbas marched upon Melinde, and threatened it with the fate of Kilwa and Mombasah. But the firmness of the Sultan and the courage of Mattheus Mendes de Vasconcellos were equal to the occasion: they reinforced themselves with a host of 3000 Wasegeju, and they succeeded in annihilating the cannibals. In 1592 the Wasegeju, again summoned to the assistance of Melinde, slew its enemy, the Shaykh of Kilifi. The last Shirazi Sultan of Mombasah, determining to avenge the death of his kinsmen, assembled 5000 wild men from the neighbouring hills to attack Melinde. The Wasegeju, however, not only defeated and slew him, with three of his sons, and many of the chief Moslems who accompanied him; they also captured Mombasah, and sending a young son of the defunct Sultan to Melinde, they gave up to it a city, which for a whole century had been its deadly enemy. The name ‘Mosseguaies, very barbarous,’ appears in the map of John Senex (1712). The tribe is mentioned by Dr Krapf (‘Wasegedshu’ Church Missionary Intelligencer of 1849, p. 86), and by Mr Wakefield (Wasegeju, p. 212).

We landed on the morning of Jan. 27, and were received with peculiar cordiality. In the absence of the Arab Governor, Mohammed bin Ali, we were met upon the seashore by Khalfan bin Abdillah, Hammed bin Abdillah, and the headman Kibaya Mchanga, with sundry Diwans and Wasawihili notables; by the Jemadar, with his Baloch, and by Miyan Sahib, a daft old Hindu, who here collects the customs. They conducted us up the bank to the hut formerly tenanted by M. Erhardt, seated us on chairs facing couches; brought coffee, fruit, and milk, with a goat, by way of welcome, and succeeded in winning our hearts. That day was spent in inquiries about the commerce and geography of the interior, and in listening to wild tales concerning the Æthiopic Olympus, the Sierra Nevada of Eastern Africa, which Jupiter Cooley decreed to be eternally snowless. Most of the people here pronounced the word Kilima-ngao ‘Mont bouclier,’ Ngáo being the umbo or shield-boss: from others I heard Kilima-njaro, which in Kikwafi, according to the missionaries, means ‘Mountain of Greatness.’^[26] Here Sheddad bin ’Ad built the City of Brass, and encrusted the hill-top with a silver dome, that shines with various and surprising colours. Here the Jánn, beings made of fire, as humans are of earth and mermen of water, hold their court, and baffle the attempts of man’s adventurous feet. The mountain recedes as the traveller advances, and the higher he ascends the loftier rises the summit. At last blood bursts from the nostrils, the fingers bend backwards (with cramp?), and the hardiest is fain to stop. Amongst this Herodotian tissue of fact and fable^[27] ran one golden thread of truth,—all testified to the intense cold.

Westward of the great mountain are placed in the ‘Mombas Mission Map’ the Wabilikimo (Wambelikimo), ‘literally the two measuring, i. e. twice the measure from the middle fingertip to the elbow. This is of course an exaggeration, but they are no doubt a diminutive race of men. They come to Jagga to trade, where they are called Wakoningo.’ The name, however, ‘Kimo,’ or Vazimba, the first occupants of Ankova (Madagascar), is mentioned even by Rochon: he makes them a people of pigmies, in stature averaging three feet six inches, of a lighter colour than the negro, long-armed, and with short woolly hair. South of Kafa, again, the Doko^[28] race is said to be only four feet in stature. Formerly we explained these traditional Blemmyes, or pigmies, by supposing them to be apes that have been submitted to savage exaggeration. But the state of the question has been completely changed since the Second Expedition of my friend Paul du Chaillu, who, despite the late Mr John Craufurd, discovered, the ‘Obongo,’ a race not only dwarfish, but living close to a tribe of unusually tall and powerful negroes: curious to say, they occupy about the same parallel of latitude as do the traditional Wabilikimo.

In the evening we were honoured with a Ngoma Khu, or full orchestra, for which a dollar was but a paltry bakhshish, were noise worth coin. The spectators appeared by no means a comely race, but they were healthier and in far better condition than the churls of Wasin. I saw, however, amongst them many cases of leprous white spots on the palms and soles. We took leave at night, provided by the Díwáns with a bullock and half-a-dozen goats, with fruit, and with milk. These headmen, who prefer to be entitled Sultan, are in the proportion of half-a-dozen per village, each one omnipotent within his own walls. In their presence the many-headed may not sit on chairs, carpets, or fine mats; use umbrellas, wear turbans, nor walk in the pattens called Kabkab: moreover, on solemn occasions such as this none but the Diwan may pace and whirl through the Pyrrhic dance. Said bin Salim described them as a kind of folk that want to eat—in fact, des escrocs: they accompanied us, however, gratis, on our various excursions, and when we went out shooting, our difficulty was to shirk an escort.

Knowing that Arab and Persian colonies had been planted at an early epoch in this part of the Sawahil, I accepted with pleasure a guide to one of the ancient cities. Setting out at 8 A.M. with a small body of spearmen, I walked four or five miles S. West of Tanga on the Mtangata road over a country dry as Arabian sand, and strewed with the bodies of huge millepedes. The hard red and yellow clays produced in plenty holcus and sesamum, manioc and papaws; mangoes and pine-apples were rare, but the Jamli, or Indian damson (in Arabic Zám and in Kisawahili Mzambaráni), the egg-plant, and the toddy-tree grew wild. The baobabs were in new leaf, the fields were burned in readiness for rain, and the peasants dawdled about, patting the clods with bits of wood. At last we traversed a Khor, or lagoon drained by the receding tide, and insulating the ruins: then, after a walk of five miles over crab-mounds, we sighted our destination. From afar it resembled an ancient castle. Entering by a gap in the enceinte, I found a parallelogram some 200 yards long, of solid coralline or lime, in places rent by the roots of sturdy trees, well bastioned and loop-holed for bows and muskets. The site is raised considerably above the mean level of the country, attesting its antiquity: it is concealed from the seaside by a screen of trees and by the winding creek, that leaves the canoes high during the ebb-tide; full water makes it an island. In the centre, also split by huge coiling creepers, and in the last stage of dilapidation, are the remains of a Mosque showing signs of a rude art. I was led with some pretension to a writing, perpendicularly scratched upon a stuccoed column: it proved to be the name of a lettered Msawahili—Kimángá wá Muamádi (Mohammed) Adi (Walad) Makame—and the character was more like Kufic than anything that I had ever seen at Harar. The ruins of houses are scattered over the enceinte, and a masonry revetted and chumam’d well, sunk 8 feet deep in the coralline, yields a sufficiency of water with an earthy taste. There are some others of similar style, but bone-dry, upon the creek-bank—they had probably been built from above, as the Arabs and Indians still do, and allowed to settle. The modern village of cajan-thatched huts, palisaded with trees, and the hovels of a few Wasegejgu savages, who use the ruins as pens for their goats, and stunted high-humped cows, attest present degradation. There were a few of the small Umasai asses, which are said to be useless for travelling. Amongst the children I remarked an Albino with flaxen hair and reddish-white skin, as if affected by leprosy. None of the tenants preserved any tradition about the place, which they call ‘Changa Ndumi.’ The Arabs, however, who accompanied me, declared that they belonged to the ‘old ancient’ Y’urabi, the dynasty preceding the present rulers of Oman; and if so, they must have been built before the middle of the last century (A.D. 1741). We returned in time to witness a funeral. The mourners were women with blackened faces, and habited in various coloured clothes, unpleasantly outlining angles and segments of circles. They ‘keened’ all day, and the drum paraded its monotonous sounds till the dawn streaked with pale light the shoulders of the far Bondei hills. I visited the little heap of cajan huts called Jánjá-ni, and lying half a mile to the north-east: here-were four civil men, Bohrahs from Hindostan, who lived by the cowrie trade.

On every fifth day the Tanga people hold at the neighbouring village of Ambo-ni a market with the savages of the interior. Having assumed an Arab dress—a turban of portentous circumference, and a long henna-stained shirt—and accompanied by Said bin Salim with his Excalibur; by the consumptive Jemadar who sat down to rest every ten minutes, and by Khalfan bin Abdillah, an old Arab who had constituted himself cicerone, we attended the ‘Golio’ on January 29. Walking along the coast, we passed through a village rich in cocoas and in iron forges, which were hard at work: a school of young hopefuls was busily employed in loud reading and in swaying the body. The country was pretty and fertile, rich in manioc and cocoas, in plantains, and the Ricinus shrub; there were a few mangoes—the people asked for the stones to plant—and many Dom or Theban palms (Crucifera Thebaica), whose bifurcations and re-bifurcations are so remarkable, and whose crimson fruit is eaten as in West Africa. Formerly the land was harried by the beef-eating Wamasai, hence the scarcity of cattle. After two miles we crossed some tidal creeks, corded over with creepers, and tree roots growing from black mire; we waded a sandy inlet, and we forded the small sweet surface drain Mtofu, which had water up to the waist. Another mile brought us to the River Mvo-ni (of Behemoth), here called the Zigi—two names in three miles, a truly African fashion! Salted by the tide, it flows under banks forty to fifty feet high, crowned with calabash and other jungle trees. Women were being ferried over: in ecstasies of terror they buried their faces between their knees till the moment of danger had passed away. These savages are by no means a maritime race, they have no boats, they rarely fish, and being unable to swim, they are stopped by the narrowest stream unless they can bridge it by felling a tree in the right direction, as it is said the beavers do.

Having crossed the river, we traversed plantations of cocoas and plantains, and ascending a steep hill, we found, after five miles of walking, the market ‘warm,’ as Easterns say, upon the seaward slope. All Tanga was there. The wild people, Wasumbara and Washenzi,^[29] Wadigo and Wasegeju, were clothed in greasy hides and cotton wrappers of inveterate grime. Every man carried his bow and arrow, his knobstick (Rungo), his club, his sword, and his shield, but few owned muskets. Some had come from afar, as was shown by their low wooden stools and small churning staves. The women were more numerous, and harder worked; the girls were bare-breasted, and every matron had her babe tied in a bundle to the back, its round black head nodding with every movement of the maternal person. Yet it never cries—that model baby! They carried, besides masses of beads strung round the neck, zinc and brass armlets all down the arms, and huge collars and anklets of metal, heavy loads of valuable stuff; and others sat opposite their belongings, chaffering and gesticulating upon knotty questions of fragmentary farthings. These ill-used and hard-favoured beings, with patterns burnt into their skins, paid toll for ingress at a place where cords were stretched across the path, a primitive style of raising octroi. The Bedawin exchanged their lean sheep and goats, cocoas and bananas, grain and ghee, for white and blue cottons, beads, and rude iron ware—knives, bills, and hatchets, made on the coast of metal brought from Zanzibar. The luxuries were dried fish, salt, Tembo or cocoa-toddy, spices, needles and thread, fish-hooks, and bluestone used in their rude medicine. Formerly a large quantity of ivory found its way to the ‘Golio’; now it is purchased in the interior by trading parties. The groups, gathered under the several trees, were noisy, but civil to us. Often, however, a lively scene, worthy of Donnybrook in its palmiest days, takes place, knobstick and dagger being used by the black factions as freely as fists and shillelaghs in more civilized lands. At noon we returned over the sands which were strewed with sea-slugs, and in places chœtodons lay dead in the sun. The heat of the ground made my bare-footed companions run from time to time for the shade, like the dogs in Tibet.

Sundry excursions delayed us six days at Tanga. We failed to bag any hippopotamus, the animals being here very timid. A herd of six, commanded by a large black old male, gave us a few long shots; at first the beasts raised the whole head and part of the neck; afterwards nothing but the eyes were exposed. The people declare that they always charge a man who has left a pregnant wife at home. Our only result was the dropping of my big Beattie (2 barrelled, 24 lbs.) into the water. I had fired it when sitting in a mangrove tree, and ‘purchase’ being wanted, I narrowly escaped following it. The river, however, was only 2 fathoms deep, and we presently recovered it by diving: the Arabs usually claim half the value of things thus reclaimed.

Our visit ended with a distribution of embroidered caps and Jamdani muslins, and we received farewell visits till dark. At 5 A.M. on Feb. 2nd, after a sultry night varied by bursts of rain, which sounded like buckets sluicing the poop, we drifted out to sea under the influence of the Barri or land-breeze. Five hours of lazy sailing ran us to an open road between Tanga and Panga-ni, called Mtangata, which, according to the guides, was derived from the people living on toasted grains during war or famine. It is evidently the Portuguese ‘Montagane,’ whose Shaykh, with 200 men, assisted in 1528 Nuno da Cunha against the Sultan of Mombasah. Exposed to the N. East wind, and imperfectly defended by two low and green-capped islets, Yambe (North) and Karangú (East), it is rendered by the surf and rollers of the Indian Ocean a place of trembling to the coast sailors. The country appears fertile, and a line of little villages, Kisizi, Marongo, Tamba-ni, and others, skirt the shore. Here we spent the day, in order to inspect some ruins, where we had been promised Persian inscriptions and other curios.

After casting anchor, I entered a canoe and was paddled across a bay once solid ground, in whose encroaching waters, according to local tradition, a flourishing city, extending over the whole creek side, had been submerged. The submarine tombs were like those of the Dead Sea: apparent to the Wasawahili’s eyes, they eluded mine. The existing settlements are all modern, and none of them appear upon Capt. Owen’s charts. After an hour’s work we pushed up a narrow creek, grounding at every ten yards, and presently we reached an inlet, all mangrove above and mud below. Landing at a village called Tongo-ni, where the people stood to receive us, we followed the shore for a few paces, turned abruptly to the left, over broken ground, and sighted the ruins.

Moonlight would have tempered the view: it was a grisly spectacle in the gay and glowing shine of the sun. A city was once here; and the remnants of its mosques showed solid and handsome building, columns of neatly cut coralline blocks and elaborate Mihrabs, or prayer-niches. Fragments of homesteads in times gone by everywhere cumbered the ground, and the shattered walls, choked with the luxuriant growth of decay, sheltered in their shade the bat and the night-jar. I was shown in an extensive cemetery the grave of a Wali or Santon, whose very name had perished. His last resting-place, however, was covered with a cajan roof, floored with tamped earth, cleanly swept and garnished with a red and white flag. Other tombs bore cacophonous Wasawahili appellations embalmed in mortally bad Arabic epitaphs: these denoted an antiquity of about 200 years. Beyond the legend above noticed, none could give me information concerning the people that have passed away: the architecture, however, denoted a race far superior to the present owners of the land.

Each of the principal mausolea had its tall stele of cut coralline, denoting, like the Egyptian and Syrian Shahadah, the position of the corpse’s head. In one of these, the gem of the place, was fixed a chipped fragment of Persian glazed tile, with large azure letters in the beautiful character called ‘Ruka’a,’ enamelled on a dirty-yellow ground. The legend,شيد روشن (Shid i raushan, the ‘bright sun’), may be part of a panegyrical or devotional verse removed from the frieze of some tomb or mosque. The country people hold it an impregnable proof that the men of Ajem once ruled in Tongo-ni:^[30] but the tile, like two China platters, also mortared into the Shahadah, is evidently an importation from the far north. It was regarded with superstitious reverence by the Wasawahili, who informed me that some years before Kimwere, Sultan of Usumbara, had sent a party of bold men to bear it away: of these, nineteen died mysterious deaths, and the relic was thereupon returned to its place. A few muslins, here representing dollars, had a wonderful effect upon their fancies: I was at once allowed by the principal Diwan to remove it; although no one would bear a hand to aid the Beni Nár, or Sons of Fire, as the Arabs honourably style our countrymen. The tile, a common encaustic affair, found its way to the Royal Geographical Society; nor did the East African expedition feel itself the worse for having sent it. We did not visit the Támbá-ni settlement, where, according to the people, there is a coralline mosque, and tombs are to be seen under the seawater.

Our purchase concluded, we returned to the Riámi, followed by the headmen, who after refreshment of dates, Maskat Halwa (sweetmeats), and coffee, naturally became discontented with the promised amount of ‘hishmat,’ or honorarium. At last they begged us to return, and to assist them in digging for sweet water. There were four or five carefully-built wells in the ruined city; but all had been exhausted by age, and the water supplied by the lowland-pits was exceedingly nauseous. As a rule, these people readily apply for advice and assistance to the ‘Wazungu,’ or wise-men, as Europeans are styled; and if showers chance to accompany the traveller, he is looked upon as a beneficent being, not without a suspicion of white magic. Here, with $6, we took leave of pleasant old Khalfan, our guide, a veteran, but still hale and vigorous: no Omani Arab is, I may again remark, worth his salt till his beard is powdered by Time.

At 5 A.M. on February 3rd, having shipped a pilot, we hoisted sail; after three hours we ran past Maziwi Island and slipped down before the light and tepid morning breeze to the port of Panga-ni. It was necessary to land with some ceremony at a place which I determined to make our starting-point into the interior. Presently after arrival I sent Said bin Salim, in all his bravery, to deliver the Sayyid of Zanzibar’s circular letters addressed to the Wáli, or Governor, to the Jemadar, to the Collector of Customs, and to the several Diwáns. All this preparation for a trifle of 80 miles! But we are in Africa; and even in Europe such a raid, through an enemy’s country is not always easy.

My companion and I landed in the cool of the evening with our Portuguese servants and our luggage. We were received with all honours of noise and crowding. The orchestra consisted of three monstrous drums (Ngoma Khu), caissons of cocoa-trunk, covered at both ends with goat-leather, and pounded, like the pulpit, with fist; and of Siwa or bassoons of hard blackwood, at least five feet long. These were enlivened by a pair of Zumari, or flageolets, whose vile squeaking set the teeth on edge; by the Zeze, or guitar; the Kinanda, or banjo; by the Barghumi or Kudu horn; and by that instrument of dignity, the Upatu, a brass pan, the primitive cymbal, whose bottom is performed upon by little sticks like cabbage-stalks. The Jemadar, Asad Ullah, came en grand’ tenue. The Diwans capered and pyrrhic’d before us with the pomp and circumstance of drawn swords, whilst the prettiest of the slave girls, bare-headed and with hair à la Brutus, sang and flapped their skirts over the ground, performing a pavane with a very modest and downcast demeanour, as if treading upon a too hot floor. They reminded me of a deceased friend’s clever doggrel—