Page:Some account of the town of Zanzibar.djvu/10

 creek almost dry at low water runs in round the toe and all but severs the heel from the mainland of the island. There is a bridge across the creek about half way down and another town or suburb on the mainland side.

When one approaches from the sea the air of business and activity is most striking, there are often in the harbour more than a hundred large native craft, lying packed together like ships in a dock, five or six men of war belonging to the Sultan (one of which was the Confederate Shenandoah, so notorious during the American war), and often eight or ten European ships taking in their cargoes of cloves, gumcopal, ivory, hides, red pepper, cocoa nut oil, orchilla weed and so forth.

The town itself shows a long front of square white houses built of stone. The whole aspect of the place from the sea is more Italian than African. When we land, however, the scene changes: there is no street practicable for wheeled vehicles, very few are more than ten or twelve feet wide, and in many places there is no proper street; but as it is the law that every one who builds a house should set up his scaffold on his own land, there is generally about a yard left outside the walls, and the six feet that thus intervene between the houses make the street. The greater part of the town consists only of mud and stud houses thatched with the cocoanut leaf, these are divided by internal partitions into a number of small rooms, but have no light except from the door, as for the smoke, it finds its way through the thatch promiscuously. There are some chief thoroughfares and some streets of shops, which are merely small stone houses with the front of the bottom story