HISTORY. 



35 



annals of the coast. The traveller, as well as 

 merchant, must lament that we abandoned its 

 cause ; had England retained it, the interior 

 would long ago have been opened to us. This 

 lament may seem strange in the days when we 

 propose to give up Gibraltar, as we have given 

 up Java, Sicily, and the Ionian Islands — con- 

 quests hard won by blood and gold, and parted 

 with for a song. 



The harbour of Mombasah is spacious and 

 land-locked; without exception, the best on the 

 Zanzibar coast. Its magnificent basin is formed 

 by one of those small coralline islands which, 

 from Suez to Cape Corrientes, have long been 

 the centres of commerce with peoples who, 

 brutalized by barbarism, and incapable of civil- 

 ization, would have converted mainland depots 

 into scenes of rapine and bloodshed. Of this 

 chain the principal links, the Tyre, the Alex- 

 andria, and the Araduses of East Africa, are 

 Masawah, old Zayla, Berberah — in the 16th cen- 

 tury an islet — Makdishu, Lamu, Wasin, ancient 

 Mtanga, Pemba, Zanzibar, Mafiyah, the original 

 Kilwa, and Mozambique. The island is a mass 

 of coralline, that forms scarps and dwarf cliffs, 

 45 to 60 feet high, everywhere except on the 

 west, where there is a tongue of sand, and where 



