FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. 
15 
trast, utterly ludicrous. Nothing do they then carry 
but a stick over their shoulder with a cut of stale 
fish hanging from it ; and one wonders at the extreme 
poverty of the people in the midst of such abundance. 
Besides the above products, cloves, cotton, bajra, sor- 
ghum, dall, coffee, tobacco, sessamum, grass, nutmeg, 
red pepper, betel-nut, catchoo-nut, jack-fruit, papau, 
almond, pomegranate, and the castor-oil plant, were 
all seen growing. To remark upon a few : — The 
mango-tree, met with everywhere, is splendidly um- 
brageous, more lofty than the variety seen in Indian 
topes, and not so brittle. It yields two crops yearly 
of stringy fruit ; but there are better sorts, such as 
those from Pemba Island, to be procured. The clove- 
tree is planted in rows 20 feet apart, and after it 
has grown to the height of 30 feet, it seems to die, as 
if from the effects of ants. Cloves have diminished 
immensely in value ; what cost 25 dollars twelve years 
ago can now be purchased for one dollar ; consequently 
the agriculturists do not replace the dying trees. The 
spice was being gathered by men on tripod ladders on 
the 6th September. Cotton we rarely saw. The 
cocoa-nut is the most common tree in the country — 
the husk, we observed, being used as firewood, and 
a capital salad is made from the crown of the trunk. 
The Arabs allow their slaves to cultivate the manioc 
or "mohogo" gratis, under the cocoa-nut trees, in 
payment for gathering the harvests of mango, cloves, 
&c. The growth of the ground-nut is very curious, 
creeping close to the ground, with a yellow flower and 
leaf resembling clover. On the flower withering the 
pod goes underground, where it matures. The coffee- 
tree grows luxuriantly, and the sugar-cane is very 
