“Aye, lad, cloves. They may not do so much as they did in that line, for they had a hurricane here last year, and lost most of the trees—or bushes, or whatever they are that bear ’em. It was a terror, that hurricane. I ’ve just {229} heard of it. But you can smell cloves if you take a good sniff. When we go ashore to-morrow we can see some of their storehouses, mebbe, if you want to. For myself, I ’m not much interested in cloves.” I was not greatly interested in cloves, either. When the boat took us ashore the next morning, Peter and me, and a crowd of liberty men, I saw the filth at the harbor’s edge, and the crooked, dirty streets, hardly wide enough to be called alleys; and crowds of Hindus, Malays, Chinamen, negroes, and half-castes, with an Arab or a white man here and there—very few whites. I lost what little interest I had felt in cloves. The other men went up one of the streets arm in arm, as many abreast as the street would hold, with a second rank behind. Peter stood looking after them until they had disappeared around a corner. “I wonder,” he said reflectively, “how they ’ll come back.” Then he turned to me. “Well, lad, up anchor.” We wandered about the town all day; toward the palace, to get a nearer view of the stone ship, which is a water-tank, or tanks, curiously carved; then back again through the narrow streets to the bazaars. I wondered at the heavy and massive wooden doors, almost black and all carved more or less, conspicuous in the white walls of the houses. We got hungry, and managed to find something to eat: a concoction of rice and various other things—I don’t know what there was in it, but Peter seemed to know it, and spiced it rather highly. Then we loafed from shop to shop, looking in at the things for sale, but buying nothing, although I was tempted two or three times. Peter restrained me. The shops had open fronts, and the proprietor was usually to be seen sitting fatly among the shadows. At last we came to a place where the street widened a little. Peter was hot and perspiring. So was I. The climate of Zanzibar is not all that could be desired. Peter proposed that we find a shady place {230} where they sold something harmless to drink. He found it, and we sat in a shady corner, screened from the street, and sipped our drinks slowly. Mine, I remember, was coffee, but I should not have known it for the drink that went by that name on the ship, or even at home, although I was rarely allowed coffee at home. My mother had an idea that it was stunting.