There is a something peculiarly interesting in the first aspect of the “Mrima,” the hill-land, as this portion of the African coast is called by the islanders of Zanzibar. On one side lies the Indian Ocean, illimitable towards the east, dimpled with its “anerithmon gelasma,” and broken westward by a thin line of foam, creaming upon the whitest and finest of sand, the detritus of coralline and madrepore. It dents the coast deeply, forming bays, bayous, lagoons, and backwaters, where, after breaking their force upon bars and black ledges of sand and rock, upon diabolitos, or sun-stained masses of a coarse conglomerate, and upon strong weirs planted in crescent shape, the waters lie at rest in the arms of the land like sheets of oil. The points and islets formed by these sea-streams are almost flush with the briny surface, yet they are overgrown with a profuse vegetation, the result of tropical suns and copious showers, which supply the want of rich soil. The banks of the backwaters are lined with forests of white and red mangrove. When the tide is out, the cone-shaped root-work supporting each tree rises naked from the deep sea-ooze; parasitical oysters cluster over the trunks at water-level, and between the adults rise slender young shoots, tipped with bunches of brilliant green. The pure white sand is bound together by a kind of convolvulus, whose large fleshy leaves and lilac-coloured flowers creep along the loose soil. Where raised higher above the ocean level, the coast is a wall of verdure. Plots of bald old trees, bent by the regular breezes, betray the positions of settlements which, generally sheltered from sight, besprinkle the coast in a long straggling line, like the suburbs of a populous city. Of these, thirteen were counted in a space of three miles. The monotony of green that clothes the soil is relieved in places by dwarf earth-cliffs and scaurs of rufous hue--East Africa is mostly a red land--and behind the foreground of littoral or alluvial plain, at a distance varying from three to five miles, rises a blue line of higher level, conspicuous even from Zanzibar Island, the sandy raised beach now the frontier of the wild men. To this sketch add its accompaniment; by day, the plashing of the wave, and the scream of the gull, with the perpetual hum and buzz of insect life; and, after sunset, the deep, dead silence of a tropical night, broken only by the roar of the old bull-crocodile at his resting-time, the qua-qua of the night-heron, and the shouts and shots of the watchmen, who know from the grunts of the hippopotamus, struggling up the bank, that he is quitting his watery home to pay a visit to their fields.