bazaars; their children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan’s troops assail you with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows dyed purple, crowd you to the wall.  Outside the city there are long and wonderful roads between groves of the bulky mango-tree of richest darkest green and the bending palm, shading deserted palaces of former Sultans, temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts, and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of the white exiles.  It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.

The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in your pocket.  But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them.  For the charm of Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous life of the Far East.  The good things of civilization are there, but they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in Birmingham; Reuter’s telegrams at the club and occasional steamers alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.

 [Illustration:  H.S.H.  Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
 of Zanzibar.]

Zanzibar is an “Arabian Nights” city, a comic-opera capital, a most difficult city to take seriously.  There is not a street, or any house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist.  You feel sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan’s body-guard, that the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will prove to be Sousa’s Typical Tune of Zanzibar.