The open-work iron doors, with locks as large as
letter-boxes, are closed, the wooden window-shutters are barred, and
the wares in the shops are hidden from the sidewalk by heavy
curtains. There is a park filled with curious trees and with flowers
of gorgeous color, but the park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
bought and sold.
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