"Life at Zanzibar is a busy one to the intending explorer. Time flies rapidly, and each moment of daylight must be employed in the selection and purchase of the various kinds of cloth, beads, and wire in demand by the different tribes of the mainland through whose countries he purposes journeying. Strong, half-naked porters come in with great bales of unbleached cottons, striped and colored fabrics, handkerchiefs and red caps, bags of blue, green, red, white, and amber-colored beads, small and large, round and oval, and coils upon coils of thick brass wire. These have to be inspected, assorted, arranged, and numbered separately, have to be packed in portable bales, sacks, or packages, or boxed, according to their character and value. The house-floors are littered with cast-off wrappings and covers, box-lids, and a medley of rejected paper, cloth, zinc covers, and broken boards, sawdust, and other _débris_. Porters and servants and masters, employees and employers, pass backward and forward, to and fro, amid all this litter, roll bales over, or tumble about boxes; and a rending of cloth or paper, clattering of hammers, demands for the marking-pots, or the number of bale and box, with quick, hurried breathing and shouting, are heard from early morning until night. [Illustration: THE BRITISH CONSULATE AT ZANZIBAR.] "During the day the beach throughout its length is alive with the moving figures of porters, bearing clove and cinnamon bags, ivory, copal and other gums, and hides, to be shipped in the lighters waiting along the water's edge, with sailors from the shipping, and black boatmen discharging the various imports on the sand. In the evening the beach is crowded with the naked forms of workmen and boys from the 'go-downs,' preparing to bathe and wash the dust of copal and hides off their bodies in the surf. Some of the Arab merchants have ordered chairs on the piers, or bunders, to chat sociably until the sun sets, and prayer-time has come. Boats hurry by with their masters and sailors returning to their respective vessels. Dhows move sluggishly past, hoisting as they go the creaking yards of their lateen sails, bound for the mainland ports. Zanzibar canoes and 'matepes' are arriving with wood and produce, and others of the same native form and make are squaring their mat sails, outward bound. Sunset approaches, and after sunset silence follows soon. For as there are no wheeled carriages with the eternal rumble of their traffic in Zanzibar, with the early evening comes early peace and rest. [Illustration: SEYYID BARGHASH.]