acked her
for having given me the biography, and she, under pressure, denied it in
print, and then wrote and asked me to give it back to her; but I replied
that she should have had it with the greatest pleasure, only she having
'given me the lie' in print, I was obliged for my own sake to keep it,
and she eventually died." This very considerate act of Jane's saved all
further trouble.

74. His Book on Zanzibar.

On his expedition with Speke to Tanganyika, Burton had already written
four volumes, [267] and it was now to be the subject of another work,
Zanzibar, which is chiefly a description of the town and island from
which the expedition started. The origin of the book was as follows.
With him on his way home from Africa he had brought among other MSS.
a bundle of notes relating both to his "preliminary canter" and to
Zanzibar, and the adventures of these notes were almost as remarkable
as those of the Little Hunchback. On the West Coast of Africa the bundle
was "annexed" by a skipper. The skipper having died, the manuscripts
fell into the hands of his widow, who sold them to a bookseller, who
exposed them for sale. An English artillery officer bought them, and,
in his turn, lost them. Finally they were picked up in the hall of a
Cabinet Minister, who forwarded them to Burton. The work contains an
enormous mass of geographical, anthropological and other information,
and describes the town so truthfully that nobody, except under
compulsion, would ever dream of going there. The climate, it seems, is
bad for men, worse for women. "Why," he asks, "should Englishmen poison
or stab their wives when a few months at Zanzibar would do the business
more quietly and effectually?" The expense of getting them over there
may be one objection. But whoever goes to Zanzibar, teetotallers, we are
told, should keep away. There it is drink or die. Burton introduces many
obsolete words, makes attacks on various persons, and says fearlessly
just what he thinks; but the work has both the Burtonian faults. It is
far too long, and it teems with uninteresting statistics.

There also left the press this year (1871) a work in two volumes
entitled Unexplored Syria, by Burton and Tyrwhitt Drake. [268] It
describes the archaeological discoveries made by the authors during
their sojourn in Syria, and includes an article on Syrian Proverbs
(Proverba Communia Syriaca) which had appeared the year before in the
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Soc