The new palace is of somewhat too modern architecture, and is not nearly as dignified as are the massive white walls of the native houses which surround it.  But within it is a fairy palace, hung with silk draperies, tapestries, and hand-painted curtains; the floors are covered with magnificent rugs from Persia and India, and the reception-room is crowded with treasures of ebony, ivory, lacquer work, and gold and silver.  There were two thrones made of silver dragons, with many scales, and studded with jewels.  The Sultan did not seem to mind our openly admiring his treasures, and his attendants, who stood about him in gorgeous-colored silks heavy with gold embroideries, were evidently pleased with the deep impression they made upon the visitors.  The Sultan was very gentle and courteous and human, especially in the pleasure he took over his son and heir, who then was at school in England, and who, on the death of his father, succeeded him.  He seemed very much gratified when we suggested that there was no better training-place for a boy than an English public school; as Americans, he thought our opinion must be unprejudiced.  Before he sent us away, he gave Childs, and each of us, a photograph of himself, one of which is reproduced in this book.

Our next port was the German settlement of Tanga.  We arrived there just as a blood-red sun was setting behind great and gloomy mountains.  The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and surrounded even to the water’s edge by a steaming jungle.  It was more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp three lions had kept him awake until morning.

 [Illustration:  Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
 Tanga.]

The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports.  We saw them only through field-glasses from the ship’s side, so that there is, in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of Africa.  But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed away.  It was certainly worth taking once.  If I have failed to make that apparent, the fault lies with the writer.  It is certainly not the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that “sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue,” or of the exiles and “remittance men,” or of the engineers who are building the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest, and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.