GOJSTJA TO LONDON. 
311 
the docile inhabitants. Scarcely more than forty miles in 
a direct line from where we are gazing over Usambara, 
are European houses, churches, schools, dispensaries, 
and, I daresay, tennis-courts and cricket-grounds. 
The thought that civilization was so near us rendered 
me impatient with the wilderness which, for a wonder, 
began to lose its potent charm. I hurried along the 
red track, and gazed so fixedly towards our goal, a 
distant clump of huts and stone walls, which is called 
Mazindi, that I bestowed but little observation on the 
surrounding landscape. Nevertheless I could not but 
notice the numbers and numbers of handsome hy- 
phoene 1 palms that lined the way. We walked 
through a stately grove, which, but for the different 
species of palm, reminded me of Elche in South- 
Eastern Spain. My men could not resist stopping to 
gnaw the gingerbread-like fruit of the hyphoene, and 
so I got far ahead of them and arrived alone at the 
gate of Mazindi. 
Women were returning from the river with their 
filled pitchers gracefully poised on the head. Their 
faces were pleasing, and their complexions a clear 
olive—I was just going to write “ evidently from 
Arab intermixture,” but I hesitate. The subject of 
the origin of these Usambara people is rather a com¬ 
plicated one, and their lightness of complexion seems 
to be due to some other cause than a strain of Arab 
blood. I cited this as the reason why the Wa-zeguha 
of Gonja were so different to the negro type, but I did 
so in despair of any other solution, and because I 
knew that the Wa-zeguha on the coast had for cen¬ 
turies come into contact with the Arabs ; but with 
the Wa-sambara, whom I first met here in Mazindi it 
1 Hyphoene Thebaica. 
