The poorer Arabs who flock to Zanzibar during the season are Hazramis, and they work and live hard as the Hammals of Stamboul. These men club and mess together in gangs under an Akidah (head man), who supplies them with rice, ghi, and scones, and who keeps the accounts so skilfully, that the labourer receives annually about $35, though he may gain four times that sum. Pauper Arabs settled upon the Island refuse ‘nigger work,’ the West Indian synonym for manual labour, and, as a rule, the Mashamba or plantations supply them, like Irish estates of old, with everything but money. At first many were ruined by the abolition of slave export: at present most of them confess that the measure has added materially to the development and the prosperity of the Island. There are now Arab merchants who own 80,000 clove-trees, $100,000 floating capital, a ship or two, and from 1000 to 2000 slaves. The results of wealth and general aisance have been luxury and unbridled licentiousness. As usual in damp-hot climates, for instance, Sind, Egypt, the lowlands of Syria, Mazenderan, Malabar, and California, the sexual requirements of the passive exceed those of the active sex; and the usual result is a dissolute social state, contrasting with mountain countries, dry-cold or damp-cold, where the conditions are either equally balanced or are reversed. Arab women have been described as respectable in the Island, because, fearing scandal and its consequences, they deny themselves to Europeans. Yet many of them prefer Banyans to those of the True Faith, whilst the warmest passions abandon themselves to African slaves:[99] these dark men are such pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes, and their fascinations at Zanzibar are so great, that a respectable Hindostani Moslem will not trust his daughter to live there, even in her husband’s house. A corresponding perversion and brutality of taste make the men neglect their wives for negresses; the same has been remarked of our countrymen in Guiana and the West Indies, and it notably prevails in the Brazil, where the negress and the Mulatta are preferred to the Creole. Considering the effect of the African skin when excited by joy, rage, fear, or other mental emotion, of course a cogent reason for the preference exists.