f them of four
stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the
summer hotels along the Jersey coast. It is a town built upon the
sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the
lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were
more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia. It
suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the
board-walk at Atlantic City. When we found that in spite of her
Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing
except an American summer-resort, we set to discovering why this
should be, and decided it was because, after the red dust of the
Colony and the Transvaal, we saw again stretches of white sand, and
instead of corrugated zinc, flimsy houses of wood, which you felt
were only opened for the summer season and which for the rest of
the year remained boarded up against driven sands and equinoctial
gales. Beira need only to have added to her "Sea-View" and "Beach"
hotels, a few bathing-suits drying on a clothes-line, a tin-type
artist, and a merry-go-round, to make us feel perfectly at home.
Beira being the port on the Indian Ocean which feeds Mashonaland and
Matabeleland and the English settlers in and around Buluwayo and
Salisbury, English influence has proclaimed itself there in many
ways. When we touched, which was when the British soldiers were
moving up to Rhodesia, the place, in comparison with Lorenco
Marquez, was brisk, busy, and clean. Although both are ostensibly
Portuguese, Beira is to Lorenco Marquez what the cleanest street of
Greenwich Village, of New York City, is to "Hell's Kitchen" and the
Chinese Quarter. The houses were well swept and cool, the shops were
alluring, the streets were of clean shifting white sand, and the
sidewalks, of gray cement, were as well kept as a Philadelphia
doorstep. The most curious feature of Beira is her private tram-car
system. These cars run on tiny tracks which rise out of the sand
and extend from one end of the town to the other, with branch lines
running into the yards of shops and private houses. The motive power
for these cars is supplied by black boys who run behind and push
them. Their trucks are about half as large as those on the hand-cars
we see flying along our railroad tracks at home, worked by gangs of
Italian laborers. On some of the trucks there is only a bench,
others are shaded by awnings, and a few have carriage-lamps and
cush