condition of the interior. We may remark the same of Ptolemy’s three great Arabian streams, which could have existed only in the imagination of travellers. As we advanced up the Rabai Water the sea arms shrank, and the scenery brightened till we felt that any picture of this gorgeous and powerful nature must be comparatively grey and colourless. A broken blue line of well-wooded hills, the Rabai Range, first offsets of the Coast Ghats, formed the background. On the nearer slopes, westward, were the rude beginnings of plantations, knots of peasants’ huts hove successively in sight, and pale smoke-wreaths, showing that the land is being prepared for the approaching showers, curled high from field and fell. Above was the normal mottled, vapoury sky of the rainy zone, fleecy mists, opal-tinted, and with blurred edges, floating on milk-blue depths, whilst in the western horizon a purple nimbus moved up majestically against the wind. Below, the water caught various and varying reflections of the firmament: here it was smooth as glass, there it was dimpled by the pattering feet of the zephyrs, that found a way through the hill-gaps, and merrily danced over the glistening floor. Now little fish, pursued by some tyrant of the waters, played duck and drake upon the surface: then larger kinds, scate-shaped, sprang five or six feet into the air, catching the sun like silver plates. On both sides the wave was bounded by veritable forests of the sea. The white mangrove affected the unflooded ground; the red species (Rhizophora Mangle, Linn.) rose unsupported where solidly based, but on the watery edge it was propped, like a Banyan tree in miniature, by succulent offsets of luscious purple and emerald green, so intricate that the eye would vainly unravel the web of root and trunk, of branch and shoot. Hence, doubtless, the name Aparaturie, or Apariturier, of the old French travellers, from parere, because the tree reproduces itself like mankind before split into Adam and Eve. Clusters of parasitical oysters adhered edgeways to the portions denuded by the receding tide; the pirate-crab sat in his plundered shell, whilst the brown newt and rainbow-tinted cancers, each with solitary claw, plunged into their little hiding-holes, or coursed sidling amongst the harrow-work of roots, and the green tufted upshoots binding the black mass of ooze. These are the ‘verdant and superb, though unfruitful, trees’ of the old Portuguese navigator, which supply the well-known ‘Zanzibar rafters.’ Various lichens sat upon the branch forks, and tie-tie, or llianas, hung like torn rigging from the boughs. Here and there towered a nodding cocoa, an armed bombax (silk-cotton tree), or a ‘P’hun’-tree, with noble buttressed shaft and canopied head of leek-green, glinted through by golden beams. Fish-hawks, white and brown-robed, soared high in ether. Lower down, bright fly-catchers hunted the yellow butterflies that