Sayyid Barghash is the son of the last joint ruler of Maskat and Zanzibar—Sayyid Sa’id. His mother was an Abyssinian woman. He has nearly a hundred wives and five or six children, one son only among them. He is brother to the present Imam of Maskat. His income is approximately 300,000_l._ a year, mostly derived from Customs duties. Zanzibar, the chief town of his dominions, known as Unguja to the inhabitants, has a population of about 90,000. As regards trade it is the most flourishing and important place in East Africa, and the value of its exports exceeds at the present time 1,300,000_l._, of which ivory alone contributes 400,000_l._ The value of the imports is about 1,000,000_l._, and they chiefly consist of cotton stuffs, kerosene oil, and rice. About 6,000 British subjects reside in the town, mostly Indians, and in their hands lie the whole retail and most of the wholesale trade. [Illustration: Fig. 13.—A Street in Zanzibar. ] The streets of Zanzibar are paved with a sort of coral “ray,” sometimes cemented over, and are generally, from the nature of their paving, clean and inodoriferous. They are very narrow, and the houses in the Arab quarters are lofty, so that you may walk about most of the town in perfect shade. There are few really handsome buildings externally, yet many of the portals to the houses and mosques are gracefully designed in Saracenic style. Considerable Persian influence is evident in the general architecture and interior decoration of the mosques and larger buildings, and the Persian pointed arch (different in shape from the Syrian or the Moorish) is constantly met with. In fact, to a student of Saracenic architecture, Zanzibar and the Zangian coast are very interesting, as they offer not only buildings of great age, some of the mosques dating back to the tenth century of our era, but of archaic style, recalling most unmistakably the kind of architecture met with in Saracenic monuments in Spain of the same age, showing thus how universal with the early Arab rule was that distinct architectural style which they developed from the late Byzantine. Just as there are words in Portuguese and Swahili[7] derived from a common Arabic origin, so the resemblance between the architecture in Southern Portugal and Spain with that of Zanzibar may be explained by recalling the fact that the Iberian Peninsula and the Zangian coast both formed at one time extremities of Arab rule. While Zanzibar, however, resembles any other Eastern city, and differs little in outward aspect from Aleppo or Jaffa, yet the island to which it gives its name is thoroughly tropical African in its virgin state. The vegetation is rank and rich, and nearly every genus of the tropical African flora is represented among its plants. There are a few orchids, supposed to be peculiar, and possibly one or two ferns. Many trees have been introduced from India, and flourish in a way that exceeds their development in the mother-country. Magnificent mangoes are