When Sir John Kirk gets conscience-troubled, and the _manes_ of the avenging _Colobi_ (as negroes would believe) tamper with his health; when Zanzibar gets stuffy and feverish, and the official routine tryingly monotonous: he steals away, often on foot, to a little paradise he has created among the groves of Mbwéni, a tiny settlement on the coast of the island. Here he lives a life that is to him ideally happy. He chats with his tenants, who lead Arcadian lives of nothing to do and plenty to eat; he wanders in a shooting-coat amid the groves of coco-palms and the clumps of pandanus that border the sea; he photographs; and, above all, he gardens. Here, among his Cycads and his Orchids, his Ensetes and his Dracænas, spade in hand, a wide-awake hat on his head, a rare flower in his button-hole, and rustic contentment irradiating his face—here, amid scenery which typifies a botanist’s paradise, Sir John Kirk is emphatically At Home. [Illustration: Fig. 15.—Colobus Kirkii. ] CHAPTER III. THE START—MOMBASA TO TAITA. After a month’s sojourn in Zanzibar, most agreeably spent as the recipient of Sir John Kirk’s hospitality, all my arrangements for commencing my expedition to Kilima-njaro were completed. I had hired upwards of thirty porters, most of them old _employés_ of Mr. Stanley’s on the Congo, and despatched them to Mombasa in an Arab dau, while I followed in the mail-steamer going north, accompanied by my personal servant, a Tamil boy from Ceylon. I took leave of Sir John Kirk with considerable regret one dark evening after an unusually agreeable dinner-party, and entered a little rowing-boat, which was to take me to the steamer, with a feeling of such downheartedness that my calmer reflections told me Zanzibar was likely to prove my African Capua. After my own experience I could realize now how previous explorers had been unnerved and unfitted for the rough life of the wilderness by the luxurious and easy-going life in Zanzibar. Fortunately the steamer I was journeying in to Mombasa was the same vessel which had brought me down to Aden, so that I once more found myself among friends. The night I left Sir John Kirk’s was stiflingly hot, and the steamer was full of passengers—I shuddered at passing the night in a poky cabin with three other inmates. The captain saw my hesitation, and offered most kindly to rig up a cot for me on deck. I accepted his proposal eagerly, forgetting the danger in it, of which both of us were unaware. The steamer, according to custom, would remain all night in Zanzibar harbour, and leave at dawn. Now—and this is the only reason I record this incident—there is no surer way of getting a bad fever than to sleep in the open air in a tropical port. The reasons for this are many and would take up a great deal of time and space to describe properly; I therefore confine myself to the dogmatic assertion, which I here record in the