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[71?]
We took a guide and for an hour or more walked through the quaint streets.
These are probably similar to those of many oriental towns but this has a characteristic all its own.
It is now clean and the streets are paved or asphalted.
No street runs straight.
Evidently there was no order of laying out the land.
The buildings are old for the town dates from the 16th century.
It has been the scene of repeated wars between the Portuguese and the Arabs, sometimes under the rule of one and sometimes of the other.
The streets are so narrow that a narrow carriage driven through compels the people to scurry into door ways in order that it may pass.
The driver jangles his bell and shouts the warning for the crookedness of the streets does not allow the pedestrians to see many feet ahead.
Here is the chief distributing point for all Eastern Africa and for three centuries the town has been famed as a market for all kinds of goods from the orient.
Shops without number containing the choicest things from Parisian jewelery to Japanese embroidery tempt the unwary.
Buildings of stone or at least cement covered with curious Portuguese and Arab architecture, adorned with beautiful porticos, or balconys carefully screened, make the scene fascinatingly picturesque.
The chief interest centers in the people however.
They are chiefly Indian, Arabic, and Swahili (the native tribe) with a very small percent of whites.
The Indian and Arabic Mohammedan do not dress the same apparently.
The Arabic women wear their black dismal strip of calico well arapped [wrapped] about the upper part of the body and covering the head and face, the Indian women were dressed in beautiful, fancysilk [fancy silk] wraps with head uncovered and with the invariable gold button in the side of the nose and at least three earrings in each ear, one in the top, one in the side and one in the lobe.
The Swahilis were in part merely covered with their gay calico wrap covering the body from the top of the busts down to the knees and with Hair or wool in even rows and braid the hair so that the head looks as if covered with rows of tiny braids.
This was very neat and pretty.
Then the Swahilis who were Mohammedan were swathed in black heads and faces covered down to the knees but with legs and feet bare.
The Arab men are clad with what looks like a woman's high necked night dress of white.
He seems to havesometing [have something] under it but what I do not know.
This is the land where men invariably wear skirts and many women-Mohammedan- wear trousers.
One kind of women's pants were white and came to the ankle closing rather tightly above the bare feet.
A very full ruffle of about five inches wide adorned the bottom and made them look like bantams.
One could remain a very long time in Zanzibar and be entertaind [entertained] by the dress of the people were there no other attractions.

The most conspicuous building on the shore front looks like a summer hotel of commodious proportion.
It is the Sultan's palace.
His father had one befitting a Sultan, but the British bombarded it and the ruins are only to be seen.
It stands in a beau[tiful] old garden and faces the sea.
The hew [view] is not beautiful.
A row of big solid stone buildings adjoins the Sultan's Palace.
This is the Harem, where resides the two Arabic and 98 Swahili wives.
As the Sultan is only 28 years old, he has a fair record in matrimony.
Zanzibar is on an island 50 miles long and 27 wide.
There is an island of good size near-Pemba-and there are several small islands and a strip of coast land in the Sultan's domains.
It is all under the British Protection.

The next morning we went ashore at nine o clock.
The guide of the day before met us and we entered a small antique carriage drawn by two woe begone looking mules.
We drove about the town visiting the market which ws [was] most interesting.
Pawpaws, mangoes, [naatches?], queer melons, mallows and many things without name of place engaged our attention.
Great grapefruits which must be the original of this popular fruit were there also and nothing so conspicuous as the great piles of cocoanuts and casava roots.
From the latter tapioca is made but the natives boiled and prepared it into a sort of meal.
It forms the staple food of large numbers of natives in the interior of Africa.
There were little stalls without number also where the native demands could be satisfied.
We drove into the country and on both sides of the street were the native thatched houses with plastered "stoeps" and here the family work was done and often articles were there for sale.
We passed a laundry where the work was being done out of doors and all by men.
They slapped te [the] garments on stone tables made for the purpose to get them clean.

We visited an Indian Club set in a beautiful garden where were many strage [strange] and beautiful trees.
The most beautiful were the mangoes, large, shaped like elms

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