Page:Some account of the town of Zanzibar.djvu/14

 us to take it, as being the best and healthiest house we could hope to find, as indeed it is, lying at the corner of the town which projects most into the sea and rising above all its neighbours so as to catch whatever breeze is stirring. We found it full of coal-dust and many of the windows broken away and shutters gone, and have been repairing and improving ever since, but we found a difficulty in getting men even to come and work in the house, such was their fear of the spirit, and I have often kicked away from that corner of the house pots of incense set there by the work people as a propitiation. People used to come and ask us to let them into our grounds to pray there, and when a solemn procession is made round the town, as it is sometimes, to deprecate plague or famine, they always pause there. I used to hope we might some day build a church and place its altar over the site of this old superstition, and as, since I left, Bishop Tozer has bought the house at a very advantageous rate it is now quite possible.

Such then is the town of Zanzibar, in a climate where winter and summer are hardly marked by any difference of heat or of the length of the day, the thermometer seldom standing far from eighty degrees in the house, and the sun always rising and setting within twenty minutes of six o'clock. There are never storms nor ever a really high wind for more than half an hour or so at a time. The strongest marks of season are the rains, the less in November the greater in April or from March till June. These occur when the wind is uncertain: from December to March it blows from the north, from June to October it blows from the south. After the