Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/402

 is another large room, with a depression and drain in the cement floor; every floor in the house is of cement and the walls of rough stucco plastered outside and inside. The water for bathing is carried to the Hay home by negro women, and for this service they receive three shillings a month, or seventy-two cents. The women carry the water on their heads, in Standard Oil tins, and have the best figures in the world, because of their habit of carrying loads on their heads. In the Hay house, as in all the other homes in Zanzibar, there is a roof garden, where the dwellers go when the nights are excessively hot. The Hay servants receive $1.25 a month, and board themselves. Mr. Hay told me they were great thieves; most of the other white people I met in Africa spoke highly of the honesty of the blacks. The approach to the house is a crooked street nine feet wide, and the front door an elaborate affair of bronze. An Arab invests a great deal of his money in his front door, as river pilots are said to invest most of their money in watch chains. This queer, rambling house rents for $20 a month. While sitting on its veranda, looking out to sea, a warship lying only a few hundred yards away fired a salute of a dozen guns, and caused Adelaide to scream, as the guns were pointed directly at us Mr. Hay has lived on the edge of the east fifteen or twenty years, as an employee of the cable company, and says that in his bachelor days he never shaved or put on socks except when a ship was expected in the harbor. The arrival of a ship in these far-away places is a big event to the white residents, as they nearly always dine aboard, and hear gossip from home