Besides our Consulate, there is a French and an American one, and the European merchants were composed of French, Germans, and Americans,--the dark-coloured ones being principally confined to Arabs, Hindis, and the Wasuahili, or coast people. Taking advantage of the time, especially the evenings, I spent most of them in rating the chronometers and getting all the surveying instruments into working order; whilst Captain Burton, besides book-making, busied himself in making all the other arrangements for the journey, such as purchasing Venetian beads, brass wire, and American sheetings, &c., which come here in shiploads round the Cape of Good Hope, or in buying donkeys for our riding and their transport. Then in the cool of the mornings we took social walks or rides through the clove plantations, or amongst the palms, mango-trees, and orange gardens, treating pine-apples, which grew like common weeds on the roadsides, as if they were nothing better than ordinary turnips, though when placed upon the table they are certainly as delicious as any living fruit. The only fine houses are those occupied by the Europeans and the Sultan, and they front the harbour, which is considered a very good one, and is very constantly filled with shipping, the Sultan's men-of-war, foreign square-rigged vessels, and a host of buggaloes from Aden, Muscat, Catch, and Bombay. The back of the town is very much like a common Indian bazaar, but there is a hollow square in its centre, which nowadays is peculiar to this place--it is the slave-market. Immediately after every fresh importation, you can see in the early morning unhappy-looking men and women, all hideously black and ugly, tethered to one another like horses in a fair, and calculating men, knowing judges of flesh and limb, walking up and down, feeling their joints and looking out to make a bargain. Women, of course, sell better than the men, being fitted to more general purposes. For a good wife any sum might be given. But the saddest sight which came under my observation was the way in which some licentious-looking men began a cool, deliberate inspection of a certain divorced culprit who had been sent back to the market for inconstancy to her husband. She had learnt a sense of decency during her conjugal life, and the blushes on her face now clearly showed how her heart was mortified at this unseemly exposure, made worse because she could not help it.