Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/162

158 a few hours was made at the low island built of coral on which Mozambique stands. The town is picturesque with its square topped houses and walls washed a bright red, yellow and light blue, the native huts of bamboo thatched with palm leaves, and the numerous palm trees growing everywhere. A stay of a day and a half allowed us to see Mombasa, to make purchases in its native bazaars, and to take a journey by train to Mazeros, fourteen miles up into the country. The town is close to the equator and we saw luxuriant tropical vegetation, cocoanut and other species of palms, and the huge squat trunks of the baobab—a pleasing contrast after our long experience of the driedup veld. Leaving there, eleven days of burning sun and hot stifling nights in the Indian Ocean, across the gulf of Aden and up the Red Sea whose waters one day showed a temperature of 92° Fahrenheit, brought us to Suez. After a week in Egypt necessitated by the block in the Canal, the ship left Port Said for Marseilles where many landed in order to reach England rapidly. The remnant, passing through the Straits of Gibraltar and crossing the Bay of Biscay, disembarked at Southampton on October 24.

The one sad incident which occurred during the tour was the illness and death of Sir William Wharton, at Cape Town, after our departure from Beira. His work and scientific attainments will find a more fitting record elsewhere. Those who had learned to know him as a fellow-traveler can readily understand and sympathize with the sense of loss experienced by his family and many friends. As I revise these lines comes the news of the death in Cambridge of another member of the party which will not be less severely felt, Sir Richard Jebb, perhaps the most distinguished scholar of his day and a leading authority on educational questions. One rarely talked with him without drawing something interesting from his great store of knowledge and he added much to the success of the meeting and the pleasure of the voyages by his presence amongst us.

It is almost impossible to sum up in a few sentences the wealth of impressions received during the five weeks in South Africa and the subsequent brief visits in East and North Africa. A 'gigantic picnic,' as Professor Darwin characterized the tour in one of his speeches, it truly was; but it was also a 'scientific picnic' with wonderful opportunities for profit to those who wished to take advantage of them. The various handbooks, specially prepared for us, on matters connected with the colonies, the arrangements made for seeing everything without waste of time and with the minimum of trouble, the way in which all the people put themselves at our disposal whether for showing the country or for telling what they knew—all helped to make the