The gateway is the usual intricate barbican. Here in olden times, after the prayers of el Asr (3 p.M.) the governor and three judges, patriarchs with long grey beards, unclean white robes, and sabres in hand, held courts of justice, and distributed rough-and-ready law to peaceful Banyans, noisy negroes, and groups of fierce Arabs. The square bastion projecting from the curtain now contains upper rooms for the Baloch Jemadar (commandant). The ground-floor is a large vestibule, upon whose shady masonry-benches the soldiery and their armed slaves lounge and chat, laugh and squabble, play and chew betel. On the left of the outer gate is a Cajan shed, where native artists are setting up carriages for the guns whose lodging is now the hot ground. The experiment of firing a piece was lately tried; it reared up and fell backwards, smashing its frail woodwork and killing two artillery ‘chattels.’ Travellers have observed that a launch could easily dismantle this stronghold. It was once, the legend runs, attacked and taken by a single ‘Jack,’ for the honour of whose birthplace Europe and America vainly contend. Determined to liberate two brother-tars from the ignoble bilboes, he placed himself at the head of a party consisting of a Newfoundland dog. He fell upon the guard _sabre au poing_, and, left master of the field, he waved his bandanna in vinous triumph from the battlements. Sad to relate, this Caucasian hero succumbed to Hamitic fraud. The discomfited slaves rallied. Holding a long rope, they ran round and round the enemy, till, wound about like a windlass or a silk cocoon, he was compelled to surrender at discretion. The interior of the fort is jammed with soldiers’ huts, and divided into courts by ricketty walls. Here, too, is the only jail in Zanzibar. The stocks (Makantarah), the fetters, the iron collars, and the heavy waist- chains, do not prevent black man from conversationizing, singing comic songs, and gambling with pebbles. The same was the case with our gruel- houses—‘Kanji-Khanah,’ vulgò ‘Conjee-Connah’—in British India. The Sepoys laughed at them and at our beards. The Bombay Presidency jail is known to Arabs as El Bistan (El Bostan, the Garden), because the courts show a few shrubs, and with Ishmaelites a ‘Bistan’ has ever an _arrière pensée_ of Paradise. But the most mutinous white salt that ever floored skipper would ‘squirm’ at the idea of a second night in the black-hole of Zanzibar. Such is the Oriental beau-ideal of a prison—a place whose very name should develope the goose-skin, and which the Chinese significantly call ‘hell.’