Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/412

 6 are mainly people from India, and thousands of children were playing about the narrow passages, or in the quaint shops, which were almost as small as shops set up by children at play. It was almost dark, and the usual illumination in the average shop was a lantern. The shopkeepers wore turbans, and all sorts of strange clothing, and there was a touch of every country except the country I am most familiar with. I could not have named one-tenth of the articles displayed in the shops, and in one place a phonograph was playing Hindu airs as strange to me as the old town of Mombasa. We went to a market where hundreds of people were quarreling over food prices, and where the people seemed to come out of foreign books rather than out of real life. Occasionally we came across a wholesale house, and in the offices of these we saw Hindus working at typewriters. Drinking-shops abounded, and out of these came drunken men who leered at us impudently and curiously. There were a good many native hotels with guests sitting idly about. Mothers ran everywhere hunting their children, and the streets, not much wider than our sidewalks, were crowded with jabbering, gesticulating men and women who seemed to us to be rather ill-natured We passed an old fort which looked as large as Edinburgh castle, in Scotland; Mombasa is a big town, and prosperous, and its institutions are on a large scale. The guide said there was a still more interesting fort fifteen minutes away, and we went there by trolley. The fort is situated on the seashore, and only a ruin, but it looked very interesting in the moonlight. The old cannon used in defense of the place, I don't know how