Page:Some account of the town of Zanzibar.djvu/11

 taken out, and are therefore quite open to the street, these are frequently protected by a narrow awning of cocoanut leaves, which is very annoying in wet weather, as you have no room to walk except either under the drip of these eaves, or exactly in the middle of the path where the rain-water is running in a stream. Not that the negroes feel so much annoyed as the Europeans do, for you may often see a man stand under the spout of a stone house and take a shower bath, or even take off his clothes and wash them in the rain-water and put them, or rather it, on again to dry.

No picture of a street in Zanzibar would be complete without two or three cows or a bull, of a small breed with humps, wandering about in search of something green. All the cattle of this part of Africa have humps, so that when we first showed our boys a picture of a cow they said "that's not a cow, where is the hump?" These cattle are excessively tame, I only heard of one, which having taken an antipathy to Europeans was shut up by its owner, not lest it should hurt the Europeans, but lest they should hurt it, which, in the eyes of its owner, a heathen Indian, would have been the greatest of calamities.

There are very few open spaces, the largest is what is called the great market (Soko kuu) close by the fort, a square-walled enclosure with a few round tub-shaped towers. Here between nine and twelve, every kind of fruit and vegetable is brought in on men's heads in immense quantities—oranges, cocoanuts, sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes, pine apples, casava root, but especially in their season mangoes, which are often