Mounted on the Prince’s best we passed through the town, where the long sharp poles projecting from the low house-eaves are not pleasant to those riding spirited nags. This is the labour hour, and all are not inactive. The weaver on his raised clay bench, and shaded by his dwarf verandah, is engaged upon a turban, whilst his neighbour converts copal, reddened by cinnabar, into ear-rings and other ornaments. The tinsmith and the Comoro blacksmith, with the usual African bellows, are also at work hammering at pots and pans, fashioning the normal weapons, arrow and spear heads, and repairing old guns. The leather-worker is moulding a targe of rhinoceros-hide, apparently all umbo, and the vendors of oil and grain, spices and drugs, glass and ‘potions,’ are on the alert. By the way we walked into the partially-walled compound or court representing the slave-market, a bonâ fide affair, not like the caravanserai which used to be fitted up and furnished by the Cairene Dragoman for the inspection of curious tourists. In 1835 a wooden cage some 20 feet square often contained some 150 men, women, and children, who every day were ‘knocked down’ to the highest bidder in the public ‘place.’ In those times the yearly importation was 6000 to 7000. The bazar was subsequently held in the Changani Quarter, near the Western Point; the late Sayyid, however, having forbidden, by way of sop to the British Cerberus, the sale of men in the streets of Zanzibar as of Maskat, it was shifted to a plantation called Kirungani. As this was found inconveniently distant, it migrated to its present site. Lines of negroes stood like beasts, the broker calling out ‘bazar khush!’—the least hideous of the black faces, some of which appeared hardly human, were surmounted by scarlet night-caps. All were horridly thin, with ribs protruding like the circles of a cask, and not a few squatted sick on the ground. The most interesting were the small boys, who grinned as if somewhat pleased by the degrading and hardly decent inspection to which both sexes and all ages were subjected. The woman-show appeared poor and miserable; there was only one decent-looking girl, with carefully blacked eye-brows. She seemed modest, and had probably been exposed for sale in consequence of some inexcusable offence against decorum. As a rule, no one buys adult domestic slaves, male or female, for the sufficient reason that the masters never part with them till they are found incorrigible. These, however, are mostly Bozals, or wild serviles newly driven from the interior, and they are not numerous, the transactions of the year being now concluded. The dealers smiled at us, and were in good humour.