We landed, and curiously inspected the people of Tumbatu, for we were now beyond Semitico-Abyssinian centres, and we stood in the presence of another and a new race. They are called by the Omani Arabs Makhádim— helots or serviles—and there is nothing free about them save their morals. Suspicious and fearful, numerous and prolific, poor and ill- favoured, they show all the advantages and the disadvantages of an almost exclusive ichthyophagism. Skilful in divination, especially by Báo or geomancy, they have retained, despite El Islam, curious practices palpably derived from their wild ancestry of the Blackmoor shore. They repair, for the purpose of ‘clear-seeing,’ to a kind of Trophonius cave, spend the night in attack of inspiration, and come forth in the morning ‘Agelasti, mæsti, cogitabundi.’ Similarly the Nas-Amun (Nasamone) slept, for insight into futurity, upon their ancestral graves. The wild highlanders of the East African ghauts have an equally useful den in their grim mountains; and on the West African coast the Krumen consult the ‘Great Debbil,’ who lives in a hole amongst the rocks of Grand Cavalla. The traveller who, _pace_ my friends of the Anthropological Society, postulates spiritualism or spiritism (as M. Allan Kardec has it), will save himself much mystification, and he will soon find that every race has had, and still has, its own Swedenborg. The men of Tumbatu at their half-heathen wakes, lay out the corpse, masculine or feminine, and treat it in a way which reminds us of Hamlet’s (Act v. 1) ‘Where be your gibes now? your gambols, your songs?’ A male friend will say to his departed chum— ‘O certain person! but a few days ago I asked thee for cocoa-nut-water and tobacco, which thou deniedest to me—enh? Where is now the use of them?’ ‘Fellow!’ a woman will address the dead, ‘dost thou remember making fierce love to me at such and such a time? Much good will thy love do me now that thou art the meat of ugly worms!’ Their abuse is never worse than when lavished by a creditor upon a defunct debtor.