A BLACK JUGURTHA. 



343 



and towns occasionally visit the Island on public 

 and private business. Twice a year, in our mid- 

 summer and midwinter, a crowd of the Wanyam- 

 wezi and other races of the inner intertropical 

 regions flock, via the Coast, into Zanzibar, where 

 they engage themselves as porters, and undertake 

 carrying packs for the native traders to the Lake 

 llegions and other meeting-places of commerce. 

 They are so wild, that they cannot be induced to 

 enter a house ; and the terror of one who was 

 brought to the consular residence w r as described 

 as grotesquely comical : even the more civilized 

 look upon a stone abode as a cavern or a dun- 

 geon. These half-naked miserables may be seen 

 devouring, like birds of prey, carrion and putrid 

 fish in the outskirts of the city ; they have also 

 a ' Devil's tree,' whose trunk bristles with nails, 

 and whose branches are robed in foul rags. 



Some years ago one of the chiefs of the in- 

 terior, I Avas told, was brought to Zanzibar a 

 prisoner of war. He is described as a man of 

 kingly presence, 6 feet 2 inches tall, handsome 

 in face, and well-formed in head ; his skin was 

 covered with scar and tattoo in patterns, amongst 

 which the crescent shape predominated. 1 When 



1 One of my informants suggested that from this peculiar 

 tattoo, ' Unyainwezi,' the Land of the Moon, might have taken 



