Estranged from the land of his forefathers, he rarely visits Zanzibar, where the restraints of semi-civilisation, the decencies of oriental society, and the low estimation in which the black skin is held, weary and irritate him. His point of honour seems to consist chiefly in wearing publicly, in token of his Arab descent, a turban and a long yellow shirt, called El Dishdasheh. The Wamrima, or coast-clans, resemble even more than the half-caste Arabs their congeners the Washenzi. The pure Omani will not acknowledge them as kinsmen, declaring the breed to be Aajam, or gentiles. They are less educated than the higher race, and they are more debauched, apathetic, dilatory, and inert; their favourite life is one of sensual indolence. Like the Somal, they appear to be unfitted by nature for intellectual labour; of the former people there is but one learned man, the Shaykh Jami of Harar, and the Kazi Muhiyy-el-Din of Zanzibar is the only literato amongst the Wasawahili. Study, or indeed any tension of the mind, seems to make these weak-brained races semi-idiotic. They cannot answer Yes or No to the simplest question. If, for example, a man be asked the place of his tribe, he will point to a distance, though actually living amongst them; or if questioned concerning some particular of an event, he will detail everything but what is wanted. In the earlier days of exploration, I have repeatedly collected the diwans, and, after a careful investigation and comparison of statements, have registered the names and distances of the stages ahead. These men, though dwelling upon the threshold of the regions which they described, and being in the habit of traversing them every year, yet could hardly state a single fact correctly; sometimes they doubled, at other times they halved, the distance; they seldom gave the same names, and they almost always made a hysteron-proteron of the stations. The reader may gather from this sample some idea of the difficulties besetting those who would collect information concerning Africa from the Africans. It would not have happened had an Arab been consulted. I soon resolved to doubt for the future all Wasawahili, Wamrima, Washenzi, and slaves, and I found no reason for regretting the resolution.