MOMBASA TO NAIROBI. 
OLD MOMBASA, OR THE BATTLE CITY. 
What did Roosevelt and his party see on the first limb of their trip over the 
Uganda railroad from Mombasa to Nairobi, which was for months the head¬ 
quarters of the great hunt, as it is of the great East Africa railroad line? 
During their short rest at Mombasa they saw a picturesque jumble of Old 
and New Africa in a town of 30,000 people—lithe, dignified Arabs, stout 
Soudanese, calm and swarthy Indians, alert and often uniformed Somalis, 
stolid British officials and polite army and navy attaches—the native populace 
numbering some 29,500. From the shores of a low-lying and small island, 
at some distance from the Indian Ocean, rises the white Moorish walls of Old 
Mombasa, Portuguese Mombasa, or “The Battle City.” And well has it 
earned its native name; but the sieges and counter-sieges which it suffered at 
the hands of the Portuguese, who craved it as the great depot of the trade in 
ivory, skins, rubber and slaves, and of the Arabs, who' naturally wished to 
hold it, came to an end when the Imperial British East African Company 
opened up the country, in 1887. It was surely time that the wars over its pos¬ 
session should cease, for they had been in evidence since the Portuguese 
first bombarded and looted the city in 1500. Portugal again destroyed it in 
1505, fortified and rebuilt it a few years later, and was expelled by the Arabs 
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