Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/569

 about, the whole forming an upheaved volcanic chain stretching about 150 miles in the direction from south-east and north-west. The Comoros thus belong physically neither to Madagascar nor to Africa, but constitute a distinct group, with partly original flora and fauna, and inhabitants also presenting some distinct features. Here the primitive African and Malagasy elements have received their culture, their language and social usages mainly from later Arab intruders.

Politically the [sic]achipelago belongs to France, which occupied Mayotte in 1841, and the rest of the islands so recently as 1886. Notwithstanding its small extent the group is of considerable strategic importance, owing to its position in the

middle of the Mozambique Channel and on the west flank of Madagascar. It has a total area of 800 square miles, with a population estimated at about fifty thousand.

The agencies by which the islands have been raised to the surface appear to have been much more energetic in the northern than the southern part of the archipelago. Mayotte in the south-east has no summits exceeding 2,000 feet, whereas Anjuan, which with Moheli occupies the centre, rises to a height of 4,000 feet, and the active volcano of Kartal or Karadalla (Jungu-ja-Dsaha, or "Kettle of Fire"), in the north-western island of Great Comoro, to 8,500 feet. This imposing mountain, with its blackish escarpments towering above the blue waters and fringed with a green wreath of cocoanut palms, presents one of the grandest