In the evening we were honoured with a Ngoma Khu, or full orchestra, for which a dollar was but a paltry bakhshish, were noise worth coin. The spectators appeared by no means a comely race, but they were healthier and in far better condition than the churls of Wasin. I saw, however, amongst them many cases of leprous white spots on the palms and soles. We took leave at night, provided by the Díwáns with a bullock and half-a-dozen goats, with fruit, and with milk. These headmen, who prefer to be entitled Sultan, are in the proportion of half-a-dozen per village, each one omnipotent within his own walls. In their presence the many-headed may not sit on chairs, carpets, or fine mats; use umbrellas, wear turbans, nor walk in the pattens called Kabkab: moreover, on solemn occasions such as this none but the Diwan may pace and whirl through the Pyrrhic dance. Said bin Salim described them as a kind of folk that want to eat—in fact, des escrocs: they accompanied us, however, gratis, on our various excursions, and when we went out shooting, our difficulty was to shirk an escort.
Knowing that Arab and Persian colonies had been planted at an early epoch in this part of the Sawahil, I accepted with pleasure a guide to one of the ancient cities. Setting out at 8 A.M. with a small body of spearmen, I walked four or five miles S. West of Tanga on the Mtangata road over a country dry as Arabian sand, and strewed with the bodies of huge millepedes. The hard red and yellow clays produced in plenty holcus and sesamum, manioc and papaws; mangoes and pine-apples were rare, but the Jamli, or Indian damson (in Arabic Zám and in Kisawahili Mzambaráni), the egg-plant, and the toddy-tree grew wild. The baobabs were in new leaf, the fields were burned in readiness for rain, and the peasants dawdled about, patting the clods with bits of wood. At last we traversed a Khor, or lagoon drained by the receding tide, and insulating the ruins: then, after a walk of five miles over crab-mounds, we sighted our destination. From afar it resembled an ancient castle. Entering by a gap in the enceinte, I found a parallelogram some 200 yards long, of solid coralline or lime, in places rent by the roots of sturdy trees, well bastioned and loop-holed for bows and muskets. The site is raised considerably above the mean level of the country, attesting its antiquity: it is concealed from the seaside by a screen of trees and by the winding creek, that leaves the canoes high during the ebb-tide; full water makes it an island. In the centre, also split by huge coiling creepers, and in the last stage of dilapidation, are the remains of a Mosque showing signs of a rude art. I was led with some pretension to a writing, perpendicularly scratched upon a stuccoed column: it proved to be the name of a lettered Msawahili—Kimángá wá Muamádi (Mohammed) Adi (Walad) Makame—and the character was more like Kufic than anything that I had ever seen at Harar. The ruins of houses are scattered over the enceinte, and a masonry revetted and chumam’d well, sunk 8 feet deep in the coralline, yields a sufficiency of water with an earthy taste. There are some others of similar style, but bone-dry, upon the creek-bank—they had probably been built from above, as the Arabs and Indians still do, and allowed to settle. The modern village of cajan-thatched huts, palisaded with trees, and the hovels of a few Wasegejgu savages, who use the ruins as pens for their goats, and stunted high-humped cows, attest present degradation. There were a few of the small Umasai asses, which are said to be useless for travelling. Amongst the children I remarked an Albino with flaxen hair and reddish-white skin, as if affected by leprosy. None of the tenants preserved any tradition about the place, which they call ‘Changa Ndumi.’ The Arabs, however, who accompanied me, declared that they belonged to the ‘old ancient’ Y’urabi, the dynasty preceding the present rulers of Oman; and if so, they must have been built before the middle of the last century (A.D. 1741). We returned in time to witness a funeral. The mourners were women with blackened faces, and habited in various coloured clothes, unpleasantly outlining angles and segments of circles. They ‘keened’ all day, and the drum paraded its monotonous sounds till the dawn streaked with pale light the shoulders of the far Bondei hills. I visited the little heap of cajan huts called Jánjá-ni, and lying half a mile to the north-east: here-were four civil men, Bohrahs from Hindostan, who lived by the cowrie trade.
On every fifth day the Tanga people hold at the neighbouring village of Ambo-ni a market with the savages of the interior. Having assumed an Arab dress—a turban of portentous circumference, and a long henna-stained shirt—and accompanied by Said bin Salim with his Excalibur; by the consumptive Jemadar who sat down to rest every ten minutes, and by Khalfan bin Abdillah, an old Arab who had constituted himself cicerone, we attended the ‘Golio’ on January 29. Walking along the coast, we passed through a village rich in cocoas and in iron forges, which were hard at work: a school of young hopefuls was busily employed in loud reading and in swaying the body. The country was pretty and fertile, rich in manioc and cocoas, in plantains, and the Ricinus shrub; there were a few mangoes—the people asked for the stones to plant—and many Dom or Theban palms (Crucifera Thebaica), whose bifurcations and re-bifurcations are so remarkable, and whose crimson fruit is eaten as in West Africa. Formerly the land was harried by the beef-eating Wamasai, hence the scarcity of cattle. After two miles we crossed some tidal creeks, corded over with creepers, and tree roots growing from black mire; we waded a sandy inlet, and we forded the small sweet surface drain Mtofu, which had water up to the waist. Another mile brought us to the River Mvo-ni (of Behemoth), here called the Zigi—two names in three miles, a truly African fashion! Salted by the tide, it flows under banks forty to fifty feet high, crowned with calabash and other jungle trees. Women were being ferried over: in ecstasies of terror they buried their faces between their knees till the moment of danger had passed away. These savages are by no means a maritime race, they have no boats, they rarely fish, and being unable to swim, they are stopped by the narrowest stream unless they can bridge it by felling a tree in the right direction, as it is said the beavers do.
Having crossed the river, we traversed plantations of cocoas and plantains, and ascending a steep hill, we found, after five miles of walking, the market ‘warm,’ as Easterns say, upon the seaward slope. All Tanga was there. The wild people, Wasumbara and Washenzi,[[29]] Wadigo and Wasegeju, were clothed in greasy hides and cotton wrappers of inveterate grime. Every man carried his bow and arrow, his knobstick (Rungo), his club, his sword, and his shield, but few owned muskets. Some had come from afar, as was shown by their low wooden stools and small churning staves. The women were more numerous, and harder worked; the girls were bare-breasted, and every matron had her babe tied in a bundle to the back, its round black head nodding with every movement of the maternal person. Yet it never cries—that model baby! They carried, besides masses of beads strung round the neck, zinc and brass armlets all down the arms, and huge collars and anklets of metal, heavy loads of valuable stuff; and others sat opposite their belongings, chaffering and gesticulating upon knotty questions of fragmentary farthings. These ill-used and hard-favoured beings, with patterns burnt into their skins, paid toll for ingress at a place where cords were stretched across the path, a primitive style of raising octroi. The Bedawin exchanged their lean sheep and goats, cocoas and bananas, grain and ghee, for white and blue cottons, beads, and rude iron ware—knives, bills, and hatchets, made on the coast of metal brought from Zanzibar. The luxuries were dried fish, salt, Tembo or cocoa-toddy, spices, needles and thread, fish-hooks, and bluestone used in their rude medicine. Formerly a large quantity of ivory found its way to the ‘Golio’; now it is purchased in the interior by trading parties. The groups, gathered under the several trees, were noisy, but civil to us. Often, however, a lively scene, worthy of Donnybrook in its palmiest days, takes place, knobstick and dagger being used by the black factions as freely as fists and shillelaghs in more civilized lands. At noon we returned over the sands which were strewed with sea-slugs, and in places chœtodons lay dead in the sun. The heat of the ground made my bare-footed companions run from time to time for the shade, like the dogs in Tibet.
Sundry excursions delayed us six days at Tanga. We failed to bag any hippopotamus, the animals being here very timid. A herd of six, commanded by a large black old male, gave us a few long shots; at first the beasts raised the whole head and part of the neck; afterwards nothing but the eyes were exposed. The people declare that they always charge a man who has left a pregnant wife at home. Our only result was the dropping of my big Beattie (2 barrelled, 24 lbs.) into the water. I had fired it when sitting in a mangrove tree, and ‘purchase’ being wanted, I narrowly escaped following it. The river, however, was only 2 fathoms deep, and we presently recovered it by diving: the Arabs usually claim half the value of things thus reclaimed.
Our visit ended with a distribution of embroidered caps and Jamdani muslins, and we received farewell visits till dark. At 5 A.M. on Feb. 2nd, after a sultry night varied by bursts of rain, which sounded like buckets sluicing the poop, we drifted out to sea under the influence of the Barri or land-breeze. Five hours of lazy sailing ran us to an open road between Tanga and Panga-ni, called Mtangata, which, according to the guides, was derived from the people living on toasted grains during war or famine. It is evidently the Portuguese ‘Montagane,’ whose Shaykh, with 200 men, assisted in 1528 Nuno da Cunha against the Sultan of Mombasah. Exposed to the N. East wind, and imperfectly defended by two low and green-capped islets, Yambe (North) and Karangú (East), it is rendered by the surf and rollers of the Indian Ocean a place of trembling to the coast sailors. The country appears fertile, and a line of little villages, Kisizi, Marongo, Tamba-ni, and others, skirt the shore. Here we spent the day, in order to inspect some ruins, where we had been promised Persian inscriptions and other curios.
After casting anchor, I entered a canoe and was paddled across a bay once solid ground, in whose encroaching waters, according to local tradition, a flourishing city, extending over the whole creek side, had been submerged. The submarine tombs were like those of the Dead Sea: apparent to the Wasawahili’s eyes, they eluded mine. The existing settlements are all modern, and none of them appear upon Capt. Owen’s charts. After an hour’s work we pushed up a narrow creek, grounding at every ten yards, and presently we reached an inlet, all mangrove above and mud below. Landing at a village called Tongo-ni, where the people stood to receive us, we followed the shore for a few paces, turned abruptly to the left, over broken ground, and sighted the ruins.
Moonlight would have tempered the view: it was a grisly spectacle in the gay and glowing shine of the sun. A city was once here; and the remnants of its mosques showed solid and handsome building, columns of neatly cut coralline blocks and elaborate Mihrabs, or prayer-niches. Fragments of homesteads in times gone by everywhere cumbered the ground, and the shattered walls, choked with the luxuriant growth of decay, sheltered in their shade the bat and the night-jar. I was shown in an extensive cemetery the grave of a Wali or Santon, whose very name had perished. His last resting-place, however, was covered with a cajan roof, floored with tamped earth, cleanly swept and garnished with a red and white flag. Other tombs bore cacophonous Wasawahili appellations embalmed in mortally bad Arabic epitaphs: these denoted an antiquity of about 200 years. Beyond the legend above noticed, none could give me information concerning the people that have passed away: the architecture, however, denoted a race far superior to the present owners of the land.
Each of the principal mausolea had its tall stele of cut coralline, denoting, like the Egyptian and Syrian Shahadah, the position of the corpse’s head. In one of these, the gem of the place, was fixed a chipped fragment of Persian glazed tile, with large azure letters in the beautiful character called ‘Ruka’a,’ enamelled on a dirty-yellow ground. The legend,شيد روشن (Shid i raushan, the ‘bright sun’), may be part of a panegyrical or devotional verse removed from the frieze of some tomb or mosque. The country people hold it an impregnable proof that the men of Ajem once ruled in Tongo-ni:[[30]] but the tile, like two China platters, also mortared into the Shahadah, is evidently an importation from the far north. It was regarded with superstitious reverence by the Wasawahili, who informed me that some years before Kimwere, Sultan of Usumbara, had sent a party of bold men to bear it away: of these, nineteen died mysterious deaths, and the relic was thereupon returned to its place. A few muslins, here representing dollars, had a wonderful effect upon their fancies: I was at once allowed by the principal Diwan to remove it; although no one would bear a hand to aid the Beni Nár, or Sons of Fire, as the Arabs honourably style our countrymen. The tile, a common encaustic affair, found its way to the Royal Geographical Society; nor did the East African expedition feel itself the worse for having sent it. We did not visit the Támbá-ni settlement, where, according to the people, there is a coralline mosque, and tombs are to be seen under the seawater.
Our purchase concluded, we returned to the Riámi, followed by the headmen, who after refreshment of dates, Maskat Halwa (sweetmeats), and coffee, naturally became discontented with the promised amount of ‘hishmat,’ or honorarium. At last they begged us to return, and to assist them in digging for sweet water. There were four or five carefully-built wells in the ruined city; but all had been exhausted by age, and the water supplied by the lowland-pits was exceedingly nauseous. As a rule, these people readily apply for advice and assistance to the ‘Wazungu,’ or wise-men, as Europeans are styled; and if showers chance to accompany the traveller, he is looked upon as a beneficent being, not without a suspicion of white magic. Here, with $6, we took leave of pleasant old Khalfan, our guide, a veteran, but still hale and vigorous: no Omani Arab is, I may again remark, worth his salt till his beard is powdered by Time.