HANDSOME MOSES. 



225 



Musa's business is extensive, but his gains are princi- 

 pally represented by outlying debts ; he cannot, there- 

 fore, leave the country without an enormous sacrifice. 

 He is the recognised Doyen of the commercial body, 

 and he acts agent and warehouseman ; his hall is usually 

 full of buyers and sellers, Arab and African, and large 

 investments of wires, beads, and cotton-cloths, some of 

 them valuable, are regularly forwarded to him with 

 comforts and luxuries from the coast. 



Musa Mzuri is now a man of the uncertain " certain 

 age" between forty-five and fifty, thin-bearded, tall, 

 gaunt, with delicate extremities, and with the regular 

 and handsome features of a high-caste Indian Moslem. 

 Like most of his compatriots, he is a man of sad and 

 staid demeanour, and he is apparently faded by opium, 

 which so tyrannises over him that he carries pills in 

 every pocket, and stores them, lest the hoard should run 

 short, in each corner and cranny of his house. ' His clean 

 new dress, perfumed with jasmine-oil and sandal-wood, 

 his snowy skull-cap and well-fitting sandals, distin- 

 guish him in appearance from the Arabs ; and his abode, 

 which is almost a village, with its lofty gates and 

 its spacious courts, full of slaves and hangers-on, con- 

 trasts with the humility of the Semite tenements. 



On arrival at Kazeh I forwarded to Musa the intro- 

 ductory letter with which H. H. the Sayyid Majid 

 had honoured me. Sundry civilities passed between 

 his housekeeper, Mama Khamisi, and ourselves ; she sup- 

 plied the Baloch with lodgings and ourselves with milk, 

 for which we were careful to reward her. After re- 

 turning from Ujiji we found Abdullah, the eldest of 

 Musa's two sons by different slave girls, resting at 

 Kazeh after his down-march from Karagwah. He 

 knew a few words of English, but he had learned no 



VOL. II. Q 



