Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/401

 passengers went ashore, but I remained and listened to the band concert, and watched the unusual scene of activity about the ship. The men engaged in unloading are mainly Mohammedan negroes, and they make more noise and do less work than any other workmen I know anything about. They not only scream all the time, but keep up a sort of song. At intervals they all quit the work on which they are engaged and clap their hands in unison.

—Zanzibar is unusual in many ways, but not as unusual as I expected it to be. I measured several of its streets this morning, and found them nine feet wide. These were mainly residence streets; the principal business streets are a little wider, and automobiles run in them. I met a gentleman named Hay in Zanzibar, an official of the cable company, and called at his home several times. He lives in the queerest house I have ever seen. It fronts on the sea, and was built and occupied many years by an Arab gentleman. The house is enormous in size, and some of its rooms must be thirty or forty feet square; it amused me immensely to see a dining-table, set for two, in the centre of the enormous dining-room; Mr. Hay has no children, and he and his wife are the sole occupants of the big house, except that four native servants slip about as quietly as mice. In the centre of the house is an enormous court, open to the sunlight, and when I visited the place we used to run across this, to avoid sunstroke. The bath-room of the house