Having crossed the bridge from Melindi, we are in what is very appropriately termed Ngambu, or “t’other side.” The street is wide, but the quarter is more squalid. It is here we find the Wangwana, or Freedmen of Zanzibar, whose services the explorer will require as escort on the continent. Here they live very happily with the well-to-do Coastman, or Mswahili, poor Banyans, Hindis, Persians, Arabs, and Baluchis, respectable slave artisans, and tradesmen. When the people have donned their holiday attire, Ngambu becomes picturesque, even gay, and yields itself up to wild, frolicsome abandon of mirth. On working days, though the colours are still varied, and give relief to the clay walls and withered palm-frond roofs, this poor man’s district has a dingy hue, which black faces and semi-naked bodies seems to deepen. However, the quarter is only a mile and a half long, and quickening our paces, we soon have before us detached houses and huts, clusters of cocoa-nut palms and ancient mango trees crowned with enormous dark green domes of foliage. For about three miles one can enjoy a gallop along an ochreous-coloured road of respectable width, bordered with hedges. Behind the hedges grow the sugar-cane, banana, palm, orange, clove cinnamon, and jack-fruit trees, cassava, castor-oil, diversified with patches of millet, Indian corn, sweet-potatoes, and egg-plant, and almost every vegetable of tropic growth. The fields, gently undulating, display the variety of their vegetation, on which the lights and shadows play, deepening or paling as the setting sun clouds or reveals the charms of the verdure. Finally arriving upon the crest of Wirezu hill, we have a most beautiful view of the roadstead and town of Zanzibar, and, as we turn to regard it, are struck with the landscape lying at our feet. Sloping away gradually towards the town, the tropical trees already mentioned seem, in the bird’s-eye view, to mass themselves into a thin forest, out of which, however, we can pick out clearly the details of tree and hut. Whatever of beauty may be in the scene, it is Nature’s own, for man has done little; he has but planted a root, or a seed, or a tender sapling carelessly. Nature has nourished the root and the seed and the sapling, until they became sturdy giants, rising one above another in hillocks of dark green verdure, and has given to the whole that wonderful depth and variety of colour which she only exhibits in the Tropics.