temples of the Indian worshippers, native huts,
and the white-walled country residences and curtained verandas of
the white exiles. It is absurd to write them down as exiles, for it
is a Mohammedan Paradise to which they have been exiled.

The exiles themselves will tell you that the reason you think
Zanzibar is a paradise, is because you have your steamer ticket in
your pocket. But that retort shows their lack of imagination, and a
vast ingratitude to those who have preceded them. For the charm of
Zanzibar lies in the fact that while the white men have made it
healthy and clean, have given it good roads, good laws, protection
for the slaves, quick punishment for the slave-dealers, and a firm
government under a benign and gentle Sultan, they have done all of
this without destroying one flash of its local color, or one throb
of its barbaric life, which is the showy, sunshiny, and sumptuous
life of the Far East. The good things of civilization are there, but
they are unobtrusive, and the evils of civilization appear not at
all, the native does not wear a derby hat with a kimona, as he does
in Japan, nor offer you souvenirs of Zanzibar manufactured in
Birmingham; Reuter's telegrams at the club and occasional steamers
alone connect his white masters with the outer world, and so
infrequent is the visiting stranger that the local phrase-book for
those who wish to converse in the native tongue is compiled chiefly
for the convenience of midshipmen when searching a slave-dhow.

[Illustration: H.S.H. Hamud bin Muhamad bin Said, the Late Sultan
of Zanzibar.]

Zanzibar is an "Arabian Nights" city, a comic-opera capital, a most
difficult city to take seriously. There is not a street, or any
house in any street, that does not suggest in its architecture and
decoration the untrammelled fancy of the scenic artist. You feel
sure that the latticed balconies are canvas, that the white adobe
walls are supported from behind by braces, that the sunshine is a
carbon light, that the chorus of boatmen who hail you on landing
will reappear immediately costumed as the Sultan's body-guard, that
the women bearing water-jars on their shoulders will come on in the
next scene as slaves of the harem, and that the national anthem will
prove to be Sousa's Typical Tune of Zanzibar.

Several hundred years ago the Sultans of Zanzibar grew powerful and
wealthy through exporting slaves and ivory from the mainland. These
were not two separate industrie