The Wasawahili from Makdishu to Mozambique (Mussumbeg) are all Moslems and Shafei, as they were in the 14th century when Ibn Batuta reported them chaste and honest, peaceful and religious. Possibly under the orthodox denomination they may still preserve the heretical Zaydi tenets of their ancestors; but of this point I was not familiar enough with them to judge. If Persians, they must date from the days before the universal prevalence of Tashayyu (Shiitism), or they have abandoned their ancient faith. Feuds with the late Sayyid Said spread the school along the coast, and his Bayázi subjects became Sunnis in spite, even as Irishmen and Romans sometimes turn Protestants. El Islam, however, only fringes the Continent. With their savage irreverence for holy things, the Wasawahili calling themselves Moslems know little beyond the Kalmah, or profession of faith, rarely pray, and fast only by compulsion. Like Hindostanis, Persians, and Egyptians, nations professing El Islam at a distance from the fountainhead, amongst whom local usage has been largely incorporated with the pure practice of the Faith, they have retained a mass of superstitions and idolatries belonging to their pagan forefathers. They have a terror of the sorcerers, with whom Maskat is said to swarm, and they tell frightful stories of men transformed into hyænas, dogs, sheep, camels, and other animals. They defend themselves and their huts against evil spirits (Jánn) and bad men by Koranic versets, greegrees, and various talismans, mostly bought from the pagan Mganga or Medicine-man. They believe in alchemy and in Rimbwata, or love-philters, the latter, as usual in the East, containing various abominations. The slave girls from about Mangáo, a small port near Kilwa, are famous for concocting draughts which, after bringing on a possibly fatal sickness, subjugate for ever the affections of the patient. Similarly in India, Sind, Egypt, and Persia, no man will touch sherbet under the roof of his betrothed and prepared by her mother, unless his future father-in-law set him the example. Some of the Rimbwata or philters are peculiar: a few grains of Jowari are ‘forced’ in an exceptional way till they sprout; they are then pounded and mixed with the food. This harmless adhibition causes, say the people, either death by violent disease or intense affection. It is a superstition common to the Western East, and I have found it in India and Sind, in Peru and Egypt. Ghosts and larvæ haunt the houses in which men have died, a Fetish belief which does not properly belong to El Islam or to Christianity: the British Consulate has a had name on account of the terrible fate of its owner, the late Sayyid’s nephew. Descended from ‘devil-worshippers,’ the Wasawahili rather fear the ‘Shaytani’ than love Allah, and to the malignant powers of preternatural beings they attribute sickness and all the evils of human life. A Zanzibar negroid will not even fetch a leech from the marsh, for fear of offending him to