304 THE ZANZIBAR! 



Like the rest of the world, the Zanzibari have their faults, 

 and many of their failings are intensely irritating. Their 

 greatest vice is a tendency to desert ; they are inveterate liars, 

 and frequently present an amazing mixture of timidity and 

 foolhardiness. The Zanzibari have a hereditary fear of the 

 Masai, and an undrilled caravan is liable to terror-stricken 

 panic in case of attack. Yet the men persist in straggling 

 behind in the most hostile country, and if the fancy takes them 

 will go off single-handed to pillage a plantation, apparently 

 totally indifferent to the fact that by so doing they are en- 

 dangering the very existence of the whole party. Perhaps the 

 most troublesome fault of all is that they cannot be trusted to 

 keep awake on sentry duty. According to general report, the 

 greater the danger the more soundly the sentries sleep. To 

 find your Askari sentinels either dozing or fast asleep during 

 the most risky hours, night after night, is a severe strain on 

 the temper, and you are then apt to curse Zanzibari in general, 

 and kick the sentries in particular. I always went round camp 

 two or three times a night, and when in hostile country did 

 not take off my clothes, except to change them, for days 

 together. 



The recklessness of the men about their food is another 

 trying characteristic. At the commencement of a new stage 

 in the journey we had to serve out ten days' rations, and 

 some of the men would eat so much in the first few days 

 that by the end of the week they had none left. But 

 they can go for great distances on what appears to be the 

 most insufficient food ; some of my men carried loads of 

 1 10 lbs. from dawn to dusk, with only an hour's rest in the 

 middle of the day, on a pound and a half of beans or Indian 

 corn, and sometimes less than that. Whence their " foot- 

 pounds " of energy were derived puzzled me, until I noticed 

 that they became thinner and thinner. They illustrate the 

 laws of compensation ; for the amount of food the men can 

 eat, when they have it, is simply phenomenal. When we 

 reached the Kikuyu country on the return journey, I owed all 

 the men arrears of food, amounting with one group of men to 

 seven days' rations. I offered to give them beads or wire 

 instead of the excess of food, that they might buy for them- 

 selves any little delicacies they fancied, such as chickens or 



