Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/411

 is one of the queer affairs called a "trolley" over here, although there is no trolley. The street railway runs from the port, called Killindini, to Mombasa, a mile and a half away, and only handcars, pushed by native men, are operated. There is a double track, with branches to every important section of Mombasa. Every citizen of importance owns one or more handcars, called "trolleys," and these are lifted off the track when not in use, and you see them standing everywhere about the town. The fare up-town by trolley is not five cents, as is the case in the United States, where the people are mercilessly robbed by the corporations; the fare is forty-eight cents per passenger, after 6 , and twenty-four cents during the day. Three men pushed our trolley, and, when they came to a piece of down-hill track, they all rode. We had employed a black boy as guide at the landing, at thirty-six cents an hour, and when we struck an up-hill piece of track, the guide also helped push. Thus with four men we got along very well, and were soon in the heart of old Mombasa, said to have been besieged oftener than any other town in the world; which is a pretty good story, if true, for there is fairly accurate authority for the statement that Jerusalem has been besieged and taken fifty times The trolley system of Mombasa stops at the postoffice; we left our car there, and walked into the old part of the town. In Zanzibar the streets were crooked, but in the old section of Mombasa the buildings seem to have been built without any order whatever. There are no streets; only spaces between the buildings, and these are very narrow. The inhabitants of the section through which we passed at about