Arabs here, as elsewhere, prefer long narrow rooms (40 feet × 15 to 20), generally much higher than their breadth, open to the sea-breeze, which is the health-giver; and they close the eastern side-walls against the ‘fever-wind,’ the cool, damp, spicy land-draught. The Sala or reception-hall is mostly on the ground-floor. It contrasts strongly with our English apartments, where the comfortless profusion and confusion of furniture, and where the undue crowding of ornamental ornaments, spoil the proportions and ‘put out’ the eye. The protracted lines of walls and rows of arched and shallow niches, which take the place of tables and consoles, are unbroken save by a few weapons. Pictures and engravings are almost unknown; chandeliers and mirrors are confined to the wealthy; and the result, which in England would be bald and barn-like, here suggests the coolness and pleasing simplicity of an Italian villa—in Italy. A bright-tinted carpet, a gorgeous but tasteful Persian rug for the daïs, matting on the lower floor, which is of the usual chunam; a divan in old-fashioned houses; and, in the best of the modern style, half a dozen stiff chairs of East Indian blackwood or China-work, compose the upholstery of an Arab ‘palazzo.’ In the rooms of the few who can or will afford such trifles, ornaments of porcelain or glassware, and French or Yankee knicknacks fill the niches. Of course the inner apartments are more showily dressed, but these we may not explore.
About half way down the front of the city we debouch upon the ‘Gurayza’ or fort. The material is the usual coral-rag, cemented with lime of the same formation, rudely burnt, and the style as well as the name (Igreja-Ecclesia) recall to mind the Portuguese of the heroic sixteenth century. It is one of those naïve, crenelated structures, flanked by polygonal towers, each pierced for one small gun, and connected by the comparatively low curtains, in which our ancestors put their trust. A narrow open space runs round it, and it is faced by a straight-lined detached battery, commanding the landing, and about 12 yards long. The embrasures of this outwork are so close that the first broadside would blow open the thin wall; and the score of guns is so placed that every bullet striking the fort must send a billet or two into the men that serve them. A ‘place d’armes,’ about 50 feet wide, divides the two, and represents the naval and military arsenal—two dozen iron carronades lying piled to the right of the first entrance, and as much neglected and worm-eaten as though they belonged to our happy colony, Cape Coast Castle. Amongst the guns of different calibre we find a few fine old brass pieces, one of which bears the dint of a heavy blow. They are probably the plunder of Hormuz or of Maskat, where the small matter of a ‘piece of ham wrapped up in paper’[[23]] caused, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a general massacre of the Portuguese.’
The gateway is the usual intricate barbican. Here in olden times, after the prayers of el Asr (3 p.M.) the governor and three judges, patriarchs with long grey beards, unclean white robes, and sabres in hand, held courts of justice, and distributed rough-and-ready law to peaceful Banyans, noisy negroes, and groups of fierce Arabs. The square bastion projecting from the curtain now contains upper rooms for the Baloch Jemadar (commandant). The ground-floor is a large vestibule, upon whose shady masonry-benches the soldiery and their armed slaves lounge and chat, laugh and squabble, play and chew betel. On the left of the outer gate is a Cajan shed, where native artists are setting up carriages for the guns whose lodging is now the hot ground. The experiment of firing a piece was lately tried; it reared up and fell backwards, smashing its frail woodwork and killing two artillery ‘chattels.’
Travellers have observed that a launch could easily dismantle this stronghold. It was once, the legend runs, attacked and taken by a single ‘Jack,’ for the honour of whose birthplace Europe and America vainly contend. Determined to liberate two brother-tars from the ignoble bilboes, he placed himself at the head of a party consisting of a Newfoundland dog. He fell upon the guard sabre au poing, and, left master of the field, he waved his bandanna in vinous triumph from the battlements. Sad to relate, this Caucasian hero succumbed to Hamitic fraud. The discomfited slaves rallied. Holding a long rope, they ran round and round the enemy, till, wound about like a windlass or a silk cocoon, he was compelled to surrender at discretion.
The interior of the fort is jammed with soldiers’ huts, and divided into courts by ricketty walls. Here, too, is the only jail in Zanzibar. The stocks (Makantarah), the fetters, the iron collars, and the heavy waist-chains, do not prevent black man from conversationizing, singing comic songs, and gambling with pebbles. The same was the case with our gruel-houses—‘Kanji-Khanah,’ vulgò ‘Conjee-Connah’—in British India. The Sepoys laughed at them and at our beards. The Bombay Presidency jail is known to Arabs as El Bistan (El Bostan, the Garden), because the courts show a few shrubs, and with Ishmaelites a ‘Bistan’ has ever an arrière pensée of Paradise. But the most mutinous white salt that ever floored skipper would ‘squirm’ at the idea of a second night in the black-hole of Zanzibar. Such is the Oriental beau-ideal of a prison—a place whose very name should develope the goose-skin, and which the Chinese significantly call ‘hell.’
In my day foreigners visited the prison to see its curio, a poor devil cateran who had beaten the death-drum whilst his headman was torturing M. Maizan. An Arab expedition sent into the interior returned with this wretch, declaring him to be the murderer in chief, and for two years he lay chained in front of the French Consulate. Since 1847 he was heavily ironed to a gun, under a mat-shed, where he could neither stand up nor lie down. The fellow looked fat and well, but he died before our return from the interior in 1859.
Below the eastern bastion of the ‘Gurayza’ is the most characteristic spot in Zanzibar city, the Salt Market, so called from the heaps of dingy saline sand offered for sale by the Maskati Arabs and the Mekranis. Being near the Custom House, it is always thronged, and like the bazars of Cairo and Damascus it gives an exaggerated idea of the population. There are besides this three other ‘Suk.’ The Suk Muhogo, or Manioc market, to the south of the city, supplies the local staff of life. It is the sweet variety of Jatropha, called in the Brazil Aypim, or Macacheira, and known to us as white cassava: it will not make wood-meal, called κατ’ ἔξοχην, farinha, the flour. The poisonous Manioc (Jatropha Manihot) must be soaked in water, or rasped, squeezed, and toasted, to expel its deleterious juice, which the Brazilian ‘Indians,’ and the people of the Antilles, convert by boiling into sugar, vinegar, and cassareep for ‘pepper-pot’—I heard of this ‘black cassava’ in inner East Africa. The Suk Muhogo sells, besides the negro’s daily bread, cloth and cotton, grain and paddy, vegetables, and other provisions. The shops are the usual holes in the wall, raised a foot above the street, and the owners sit or squat, writing upon a knee by way of desk, with the slow, absorbing reed-pen and the clotted clammy fluid called ink. Behind, and hard by, is the fish-market, which is tolerably supplied between 4 and 6 p.m.—in the morning you buy the remnants of the last day. Further eastward, in the Melindini quarter, is the Suk Melindi, where the butchers expose their vendibles. As in most hot countries, the best articles are here sold early, at least before 7 a.m. A scarcity of meat is by no means rare at Zanzibar, and sometimes it has lasted four or five months.
In the Furzani quarter, eastward of and close to the salt bazar, stands the Custom House. This is an Arab bourse, where millions of dollars annually change hands under the foulest of sheds, a long, low mat-roof, supported by two dozen rough tree-stems. From the sea it is conspicuous as the centre of circulation, the heart from and to which twin streams of blacks are ever ebbing and flowing, whilst the beach and the waters opposite it are crowded with shore-boats, big and small. Inland, it is backed by sacks and bales, baskets and packages, hillocks of hides, old ship’s-tanks, piles of valuable woods, heaps of ivories, and a heterogeneous mass of waifs and strays; there is also a rude lock-up, for ware-housing the more valuable goods. A small adjacent square shows an unfinished and dilapidated row of arches, the fragments of a new Custom House. It was begun 26 or 27 years ago (1857), but Jayaram, the benevolent and superstitious Hindu who farmed the customs it is said for $150,000 per annum, had waxed fat under the matting, and was not sure that he would thrive as much within stone and lime. This is a general idea throughout the nearer East. The people are full of saws and instances concerning the downfall of great men who have exposed themselves to the shafts of misfortune by enlarging their gates or by building for themselves two-storeyed abodes. But the hat it seems has lately got the better of the turban, and there will be a handsome new building, half paid by the Prince and half by his farmer of Customs.
An open space now leads us to the finest building in the city, the palace of the late Sayyid, which we visit in a future chapter. I may remark that it is the workhouse style, though hardly so ignoble as that of H. Hellenic Majesty; but at Zanzibar the windows are far higher up, and the jail-like aspect is far more pronounced. Beyond it commences the east-end, and here lives my kind friend M. Cochet, Consul de France. He came, expecting to find civilization, whist in the evening, ladies’ society, and the pianoforte: he had been hoaxed in Paris about Colonel Hamerten’s daughters. He is thoroughly disgusted. Even the Consular residence is the meanest of its kind. No wonder that M. Le Capitaine Guillain was ‘froissé dans son amour-propre national’ when he entered it.
Far better, and more open to the breeze, is the house of the hospitable M. Bérard, agent to Messrs Rabaud Frères, of Marseille. The one disadvantage of the site is the quantity of Khoprá, or cocoa-nut meat, split and sun-dried. It evolves, especially at night-time, a noxious gas, and the strongest stomachs cannot long resist the oily, nausea-breeding odour which tarnishes silver, and which produces fatal dysentery. The Zanzibar trade, with the exception of cloves, is not generally aromatic. Copal, being washed in an over-kept solution of soda, smells not, as was remarked to the ‘Dragon of Wantley,’ like balsam. And ton upon ton of cowries, strewed in the sun, or piled up in huge heaps till the mollusc decays away, can hardly be deemed Sabæan or even commonly wholesome.