THE MK1MA. 



9 



which supply the want of rich soil. The banks of the 

 backwaters are lined with forests of white and red man- 

 grove. When the tide is out, the cone-shaped root- 

 work supporting each tree rises naked from the deep 

 sea-ooze ; parasitical oysters cluster over the trunks at 

 water-level, and between the adults rise slender young 

 shoots, tipped with bunches of brilliant green. The 

 pure white sand is bound together by a kind of con- 

 volvulus, whose large fleshy leaves and lilac-coloured 

 flowers creep along the loose soil. Where raised higher 

 above the ocean level, the coast is a wall of verdure. 

 Plots of bald old trees, bent by the regular breezes, 

 betray the positions of settlements which, generally 

 sheltered from sight, besprinkle the coast in a long 

 straggling line, like the suburbs of a populous city. Of 

 these, thirteen were counted in a space of three miles. 

 The monotony of green that clothes the soil is relieved 

 in places by dwarf earth-cliffs and scaurs of rufous hue — 

 East Africa is mostly a red land — and behind the fore- 

 ground of littoral or alluvial plain, at a distance varying 

 from three to five miles, rises a blue line of higher level, 

 conspicuous even from Zanzibar Island, the sandy raised 

 beach now the frontier of the wild men. To this sketch 

 add its accompaniment ; by day, the plashing of the wave, 

 and the scream of the gull, with the perpetual hum 

 and buzz of insect life ; and, after sunset, the deep, dead 

 silence of a tropical night, broken only by the roar of 

 the old bull- crocodile at his resting-time, the qua-qua 

 of the night-heron, and the shouts and shots of the 

 watchmen, who know from the grunts of the hippopo- 

 tamus, struggling up the bank, that he is quitting his 

 watery home to pay a visit to their fields. 



We were delayed ten days off Wale Point by various 

 preliminaries to departure. Said bin Salim, a half- 



