It has no public landing-pier. Your rowboat is run
ashore on a white shelving beach, and you face an impenetrable mass
of white walls. The blue waters are behind you, the lofty
fortress-like facade before you, and a strip of white sand is at
your feet.
And while you are wondering where this hidden city may be, a kind
resident takes you by the hand and pilots you through a narrow crack
in the rampart, along a twisting fissure between white-washed walls
where the sun cannot reach, past great black doorways of carved oak,
and out suddenly into the light and laughter and roar of Zanzibar.
In the narrow streets are all the colors of the Orient, gorgeous,
unshaded, and violent; cobalt blue, greens, and reds on framework,
windows, and doorways; red and yellow in the awnings and curtains of
the bazaars, and orange and black, red and white, yellow, dark blue,
and purple, in the long shawls of the women. It is the busiest, and
the brightest and richest in color of all the ports along the East
African coast. Were it not for its narrow streets and its towering
walls it would be a place of perpetual sunshine. Everybody is either
actively busy, or contentedly idle. It is all movement, noise, and
glitter, everyone is telling everyone else to make way before him;
the Indian merchants beseech you from the open bazaars; their
children, swathed in gorgeous silks and hung with jewels and
bangles, stumble under your feet, the Sultan's troops assail you
with fife and drum, and the black women, wrapped below their bare
shoulders in the colors of the butterfly, and with teeth and brows
dyed purple, crowd you to the wall.
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