Quite unexpectedly the procession halts under a swinging sign bearing the legend “Afrika Hotel.” The proprietor, a rotund, red-cheeked German who looks as if he had stepped straight out of a Munich beer-garden, escorts you pantingly up two—three—four flights of stone stairs, lined on either side with strange native weapons and East Coast curios, to a brick-floored cell under the roof, there being more likelihood of catching an occasional breeze, he explains, near the top. Wind in any form is as scarce in Zanzibar as rain is in the Sahara, and when they do get a breath of air strong enough to stir the window curtains it is as much of an event as a cyclone is in Kansas. The furniture of the room, monastic in its simplicity, consists of an iron bed, an iron table, an iron chair, and an iron washstand supporting a tin bowl and pitcher, for anything which is not of metal stands an excellent chance of destruction by the devastating swarms of red ants. The bed is draped with a double thickness of mosquito netting of so fine a mesh that the air within feels strained and unnourishing, like milk that has been skimmed and watered, and the heavy shutters are closed in a fruitless attempt to keep out some of the stifling mid-day heat, though the proprietor, after glancing at the thermometer, remarks that it isn't so hot after all, being only 120 in the shade. [Illustration: “Zanzibar has neither dock, jetty, nor wharf, passengers and packages alike being disembarked in small boats and carried through the surf on the shoulders of Swahili boatmen.” Illustration: The business portion of Zanzibar is a wilderness of narrow streets and dim bazaars, hemmed in with tiny shops and wretched dwellings, with here and there an ancient house dating from the Portuguese occupation. THE GATEWAY TO EAST AFRICA. _Photograph by DeLord, Zanzibar._]