‘Sea-girt isles,
That, like to rich and various gems, inlay
The unadorned bosom of the deep.’
There is a front harbour and a back bay. The latter enables ships landing cargo to avoid the heavy swell of the N.E. monsoon. The two are separated by Ras Changáni[[17]]—Sandy Point. The name, corrupted to Shangany, has attached itself in our charts to the whole city.
These coral-based islet clumps are readily made in these seas. The rough ridges of a ‘wash,’ where currents meet, are soon heaped with sea-weed, with drift-wood, and with scatters of parasitical testaceæ, which decaying form a thin but fruitful soil. Seeds brought by winds, waves, and birds then germinate; and matter, animal as well as vegetable, is ever added till a humus-bed is formed for thick shrubbery and trees. Unless deposition and vegetation continue to bind the rock, it is liable to be undermined by the sea, when it forms banks dangerous to navigation.
Dr Ruschenberger, repeated by a modern traveller, informs us that there are ‘four minor reefs, looking like great arks, whose bows and sterns hang bushing over the waters.’ As all the plans show, there are five. The northernmost link of the broken chain is Champáni (not ‘Chapany’), the Isle des Français of French charts. It became a God’s-acre for Europeans, whose infidel corpses here, as at Maskat, and in ancient Madeira before the days of Captain Cook, had during less latitudinarian times the choice of the dunghill of the cove, or of a hole in the street. Formerly it was frequented by turtle-fishers and egg-seekers: ‘black Muhogo,’[[18]] however, has been scared away by visions of fever-stricken, yellow-faced ghosts rising ghastly from the scatter of Christian graves. The bit of sandy bush, distinguished from its neighbours by absence of tall trees, is frequented (1857) by naval and commercial Nimrods, with ‘shooting irons’ and ‘smelling dogs,’ curs with clipped ears and shorn tails, bought from bumboat men: en bon chasseurs, they shoot the Sayyid’s little antelopes which troop up expecting food; and sometimes these sportsmen make targets of certain buff-coloured objects imperfectly seen through the bushes. The mouldering sepulchres in their neglected clearings make the prospect of a last home here peculiarly unsavoury, almost as bad as in Brazilian Santos. Yet there are traditions of French picnics visiting it to eat monkey—a proceeding which might have been interrupted en ville.
Westward the line of natural breakwaters is prolonged by Kibondiko, Le Ponton, or the Hulk. A mere mass of jungle, it has never been utilized. The eye, however, rests with pleasure upon the sheet of sparkling foam tumbling white over its coralline outliers, backed by dark purple-blue distance, and fronted by tranquil, leek-green shoal water. Connected with its neighbour by a reef practicable at low tides, it is separated from Changu, or Middle Island, by ‘French channel,’ deep enough for men-of-war. The shoals about it supply a small rock-oyster. The Crustacea, however, is uncultivated, and amongst Moslems it is escargot to the typical John Bull.
The most important is Báwi or Turtle Island, a low, dry bank, slightly undulated, with a beautifully verdant undergrowth, fringed and tasseled with the tallest cocoas. The Chelonian (K’hasa) of the East coast, eaten in April and May, by no means equals that of Fernando Po or of Ascension; moreover, here no man is master of the art and mystery of developing callipash and callipee. Turtle, cooked by a ‘cook-boy,’ suggests the flesh of small green Saurians (Susmár), which the haughty Persians of Firdausi thus objected to their Semitic neighbours—
‘Can the Arab’s greed thus have grown so great,
From his camels’ milk and his lizards’ meat,