The Kisawahili spoken at Mombasah is purer than that of Zanzibar, the result of being nearer the fountain-head. Here the people can hardly articulate an initial ‘A:’ they must say, for instance Bdúlá, or as often Mdúlá, not Abdullah, and they supply a terminal vowel, as Shkúlá for School; the Hindostan man who shirks our double initial consonants would change it to ishkúl. The explosive sound of the _B_ by forcibly closing the lips is given to the _M_, which becomes a perfect consonant having sound and continuance: before another consonant it creates in strangers’ ears the suspicion of being preceded by the original vowel-sound, and when following a vowel it is articulated as a final not as an initial consonant—M’áná-_m_ke (a woman), for example, would be pronounced M’áná_m_-ke. The initial _N_ also becomes before a consonant hard and explosive, and it sounds to the tyro as if a rapidly pronounced ‘I’ or ‘E’ were prefixed: Europeans, for instance, write _N_jia, ‘Endia.’ At Mombasah I heard the Arab ‘Hamzeh,’ or compression and contraction of the larynx, when a hiatus of two similar vowels occurs, as in Mcho’o (rain) and Tá’á (a lamp): in the dialects less pure the gap would be filled up by inserting the liquid R or L, as Mfuru for Mfu’u (the name of a tree). The Arabs and the more civilized tribes, I have remarked, prefer the R to the L, and say Rufu for Lufu, the Upper Pangani river, and so forth. The _T_ also assumes the cerebral sound of the Sanskrit and that which renders the English dentals so hard to foreigners.