Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/404

 paid $5 for it; another was asked $7.50 for an opal, and got it for $1.25. A professional horse-trader might do well as a shopper in Zanzibar, but the ordinary traveler is robbed. In San Francisco are curio stores displaying eastern goods five times larger than any similar store in Zanzibar. And in San Francisco the one-price system prevails. There are still larger stores in New York for the sale of curious things of Japanese, Indian or Chinese manufacture, and the merchants are reliable, whereas if you attempt to buy anything in Zanzibar, you usually deal with a rogue I had an automobile ride in Zanzibar I shall always remember. We drove across the island, a distance of twenty-four miles, and were almost constantly passing through native villages. The natives of Zanzibar seem to be more prosperous than the other negroes we have seen, and they have adopted all the customs of the strange races they meet here. Everywhere we saw negro women hiding their faces behind veils, a custom learned from the Hindus. We also saw negro women with gold buttons in their noses, rings on their toes, and bracelets on their ankles; they had seen these customs practiced by other women, and adopted them, without any particular reason I believe I saw more cocoanut trees on Zanzibar island than I ever before saw anywhere; and everywhere the people were preparing copra, the dried meat of the cocoanut. Copra produces an oil used in soap-making, and is in brisk demand. Wherever we go here we get the disagreeable smell of copra; it reminds one of very rancid butter We also passed through many miles of clove trees. Ninety per cent of all the cloves pro