Page:Works of Jules Verne - Parke - Vol 1.djvu/280

 Doctor Ferguson, consulting his notes, and after two days' traveling we have accomplished, including our deviations, nearly 500 geographical miles. Captains Burton and Speke took four months and a half to accomplish the same distance.

, an important place in Central Africa, is scarcely a town properly so called; there is not a town in the interior, and Kazeh is only a collection of six immense intrenched camps. Within these are collected the houses and huts of slaves with small courts and gardens, carefully cultivated with onions, yams, melons, pumpkins, and mushrooms of a perfect flavor there grown to perfection.

Unyamwezy is the veritable Land of the Moon, the fertile and beautiful park of Africa, in the center of the district of the Unyanembé, a delightful country, where some Omani families, who are Arabs of the purest blood, live in idleness. These people have for a long time trafficked in the interior of Africa and in Arabia; they deal in gum, ivory, striped cloths, slaves; their caravans penetrate these equatorial regions in all directions; they there seek upon the coast objects of pleasure and luxury for the rich merchants, and they, surrounded by wives and slaves, live in this beautiful country and enjoy an existence the least agitated and the most horizontal possible, always stretched at full length, laughing, smoking, or sleeping.

Around the camps are numerous native huts, large spaces for the market fields of cannabis and datuna, of lovely trees and most refreshing shade. Such is Kazeh.

There is also the general rendezvous for the caravans, those from the south with slaves and ivory, and from the west, which bring cotton and glassware to the tribes around the Great Lakes. Also in the market there is a continual movement, a regular hubbub, in which the cries of the half-breed porters mingle with the sound of drums and cornets, the whinnying of mules, the braying of donkeys, the songs of women, the crying of children, and the blows of the rattan of the jemidar, who beats the time in this pastoral symphony.