2 



THE LAKE REGIONS OF CENTRAL AFRICA. 



evenings, closed in over sky, earth, and sea, a cloud-like 

 ridge, dimly discernible from our quarter, was all that 

 remained of Zanzibar. 



I will not here stay the course of my narrative to 

 inform the reader that Zanzibar is not, as the Cyclo- 

 paedias declare, " an island of Africa, governed by a 

 king who is subject to the Portuguese ; " that it is not, 

 as the Indian post-offices appear to believe, a part of 

 the Persian Gulf ; nor, as homekeeping folk, whose no- 

 tions of African geography are somewhat dim and ill- 

 defined, have mentally determined, a rock in the Eed 

 Sea, nor a dependency of the Niger, nor even an off- 

 shoot of the Cape of Storms. 



The Artemise is a kind of " Jackass-frigate," an 18- 

 gun corvette, teak-built in Bombay, with a goodly 

 breadth of beam, a slow sailer, but a sure. In the days 

 of our deceased ally, Sayyid Said, the misnamed " Imaum 

 of Muscat," she had so frequently been placed by his 

 Highness at the disposal of his old friend Lieut.-Colonel 

 Hamerton, that she had acquired the sobriquet of " the 

 Balyuz or Consul's yacht." On this occasion she had 

 been fitted up for a cruise to the mainland ; her yards, 

 usually struck, had been swayed up and thrown across ; 

 her top spars had been transferred from the hold to their 

 proper place ; her ropes and rigging, generally hang- 

 ing in tatters about her sticks, had been carefully over- 

 hauled ; her old sails had been bent, and her usual 

 crew, a few slaves that held their own with difficulty 

 against a legion of rats and an army of cockroaches, frad 

 been increased to its full complement of twenty men. 

 His Highness the Sayyid Majid, who after the demise of 

 his father had assumed the title of " Sultan of Zanzibar 

 and the Sawahil," came on board accompanied by his 

 four brothers, of whom two — Sayyids Jamshid and Ham- 



DSI 



