Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/387

 *tion. There were certainly two boatmen for every passenger, and the noise they made was tremendous Mozambique is Moorish in design, and I greatly enjoyed my visit there. The streets are narrow and crooked, and the houses hundreds of years old; in some of them may still be seen the windows of mica with which they were originally fitted. Everywhere are the most delightful little parks, and wherever you go in the town you cannot see your way out, as the streets are crooked, and you see only queer old houses with thick walls of stucco. In most towns the streets are straight; there are long rows of houses on either side, and the streets end in a distant view of the country. But Mozambique apparently tries to hide the fact that it is a small town, so no street runs straight for more than a block or two, when it turns; thus you are constantly in a maze of houses. The streets are not more than thirty feet wide, and as all doors are open, owing to the intense heat, the visitor gains an intimate idea of the habits of the people. The Portuguese are related to the Spanish, so their houses have interior courts, and these are provided with gardens or fountains, when water can be had. I have never seen anything more quaint than the shops of Mozambique; it is a small, dull town, and its people are therefore polite. Seven out of ten of the inhabitants are negroes, but the negroes live in a location to themselves, and their houses are almost as unusual as the houses in the white town, for they differ from all the other negro huts I have seen in Africa Mozambique has an old fort, and the stones with which it is built were brought from Portugal in the rude ships of three or