Built on a stretch of sun-baked sand, between a miasmal jungle and the sea, Beira is the hottest and unhealthiest place in all East Africa. “It is one of the places that the Lord has overlooked,” remarked a sallow-faced resident, as he took his hourly dose of quinine. Even the paid-to-be-enthusiastic author of the steamship company's glowing booklet hesitates at depicting this fever-haunted, sun-baked, sand-suffocated seaport of Mozambique, contenting himself with the noncommittal statement that “it is indescribable; it is just Beira.” The town has but three attractions: a broad-verandaed hotel where they charge you forty cents for a lemonade with no ice in it; a golf course, laid out by a newly arrived Englishman, who died of sunstroke the first day he played on it; and a trolley system which makes every resident the owner of his own street-car. The heat in Beira being too great to permit of walking—a shaded thermometer not infrequently climbs to one hundred and twenty degrees; the streets being too deep in sand for the use of vehicles; and the tsetse-fly killing off horses in a few days, those European traders and officials who are condemned to dwell in Beira get about in “trolleys” of their own. These two-seated, hooded conveyances, which are a sort of cross between a hand-car, a baby-carriage, and the wheeled chairs on the board walk at Atlantic City, are pushed by half-naked and perspiring natives over a track which extends from one end of the town to the other and with sidings into every man's front yard. It struck me, however, that the most interesting things in Beira were the corrugated-iron shanty and the stretch of wooden platform which mark the terminus of the railway, and from which, in answer to my anxious queries, I was assured that a train departed twice weekly for Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia. I used to sit on the veranda of the hotel and stare across the stretch of burning sand at that wretched station as longingly as the small boy stares at the red numeral on the calendar which indicates the Fourth of July.