MTO-NI. 



31 



Imam of Maskat and Sultan of Zanzibar and the 

 Sawahil/ had manifestly not attempted African 

 copies of his palaces in Arabian Shinaz and 

 Bat' hah, pavilions with side-wings and flanking 

 towers, the buildings half castle half chateau, 

 so much affected by the feudal lords of Oman. 

 He preferred an Arabo-African modification, here 

 valuable for 6 sommer-frisch.' 



The demesne of Mto-ni has a quaint manner 

 of Gothic look, pauperish and mouldy, like the 

 schloss of some duodecimo Teutonic Prince, or 

 long-titled, short-pursed, placeless, and pension- 

 less German Serenity in the days now happily 

 gone by, when the long drear night of German 

 do-nothingness has fled before the glorious day- 

 break of 1866 — 1870. We can distinguish upon 

 its long rusty front a projecting balcony of dingy 

 planking, with an extinguisher-shaped roof, 

 dwarfed by the luxuriant trees arear, and by 

 the magnificent vegetation which rolls up to its 

 very walls. Mto-ni takes its name from a run- 



of Zanzibar, is a river or a rivulet ; also a pillow. The Qui- 

 limani River signifies simply kilima-ni, (water) from the 

 mountain. The meaning of Quilimansi (the Obi — Webbe — 

 Nile of Makdishu, "Webbe Shebayli, of late christened the 

 Haines Eiver, and called Quilimancy by De Barros, from a 

 settlement now unknown) is still under dispute. It cannot 

 grammatically be made to mean ' mountain-stream, or a moun- 

 tain with streams/ as Dr Krapf has it. 



