To-day the slave-trade brings to
those who follow it more of adventure than of financial profit, but
the houses and the official palaces and the fortress still remain,
and they are, in color, indescribably beautiful. Blue and pink and
red and light yellow are spread over their high walls, and have been
so washed and chastened by the rain and sun, that the whole city has
taken on the faint, soft tints of a once brilliant water-color. The
streets themselves are unpeopled, empty and strangely silent. Their
silence is as impressive as their beauty. In the heat of the day,
which is from sunrise to past sunset, you see no one, you hear no
footfall, no voices, no rumble of wheels or stamp of horses' hoofs.
The bare feet of the native, who is the only human being who dares
to move abroad, makes no sound, and in Mozambique there are no
carriages and no horses. Two bullock-carts, which collect scraps and
refuse from the white staring streets, are the only carts in the
city, and with the exception of a dozen 'rikshas are the only
wheeled vehicles the inhabitants have seen.
I have never visited a city which so impressed one with the fact
that, in appearance, it had remained just as it was four hundred
years before. There is no decay, no ruins, no sign of disuse; it is,
on the contrary, clean and brilliantly beautiful in color, with
dancing blue waters all about it, and with enormous palms moving
above the towering white walls and red tiled roofs, but it is a city
of the dead.
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