How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. LivingstoneStanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
History
How I found Livingstone : $b Travels, adventures, and discoveres in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone
Stanley, Henry M. (Henry Morton)
Africa, Central -- Description and travel; Livingstone, David, 1813-1873
I strolled through the city. My general impressions are of crooked,
narrow lanes, white-washed houses, mortar-plastered streets, in the
clean quarter;--of seeing alcoves on each side, with deep recesses,
with a fore-ground of red-turbaned Banyans, and a back-ground of flimsy
cottons, prints, calicoes, domestics and what not; or of floors crowded
with ivory tusks; or of dark corners with a pile of unginned and loose
cotton; or of stores of crockery, nails, cheap Brummagem ware, tools,
&c., in what I call the Banyan quarter;--of streets smelling very
strong--in fact, exceedingly, malodorous, with steaming yellow and
black bodies, and woolly heads, sitting at the doors of miserable huts,
chatting, laughing, bargaining, scolding, with a compound smell of
hides, tar, filth, and vegetable refuse, in the negro quarter;--of
streets lined with tall, solid-looking houses, flat roofed, of great
carved doors with large brass knockers, with baabs sitting cross-legged
watching the dark entrance to their masters' houses; of a shallow
sea-inlet, with some dhows, canoes, boats, an odd steam-tub or two,
leaning over on their sides in a sea of mud which the tide has just left
behind it; of a place called "M'nazi-Moya," "One Cocoa-tree," whither
Europeans wend on evenings with most languid steps, to inhale the sweet
air that glides over the sea, while the day is dying and the red sun is
sinking westward; of a few graves of dead sailors, who paid the forfeit
of their lives upon arrival in this land; of a tall house wherein lives
Dr. Tozer, "Missionary Bishop of Central Africa," and his school of
little Africans; and of many other things, which got together into such
a tangle, that I had to go to sleep, lest I should never be able to
separate the moving images, the Arab from the African; the African from
the Banyan; the Banyan from the Hindi; the Hindi from the European, &c.
Zanzibar is the Bagdad, the Ispahan, the Stamboul, if you like, of East
Africa. It is the great mart which invites the ivory traders from the
African interior. To this market come the gum-copal, the hides, the
orchilla weed, the timber, and the black slaves from Africa. Bagdad had
great silk bazaars, Zanzibar has her ivory bazaars; Bagdad once traded
in jewels, Zanzibar trades in gum-copal; Stamboul imported Circassian
and Georgian slaves; Zanzibar imports black beauties from Uhiyow,
Ugindo, Ugogo, Unyamwezi and Galla.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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