d sun was setting behind great and gloomy
mountains. The place itself was bathed in damp hot vapors, and
surrounded even to the water's edge by a steaming jungle. It was
more like what we expected Africa to be than was any other place we
had visited, and the proper touch of local color was supplied by a
trader, who gave as his reason for leaving us so early in the
evening that he needed sleep, as on the night before at his camp
three lions had kept him awake until morning.

[Illustration: Soudanese Soldiers Under a German Officer Outside of
Tanga.]

The bubonic plague prevented our landing at other ports. We saw them
only through field-glasses from the ship's side, so that there is,
in consequence, much that I cannot write of the East Coast of
Africa. But the trip, which allows one merely to nibble at the
Coast, is worth taking again when the bubonic plague has passed
away. It was certainly worth taking once. If I have failed to make
that apparent, the fault lies with the writer. It is certainly not
the fault of the East Coast, not the fault of the Indian Ocean, that
"sets and smiles, so soft, so bright, so blooming blue," or of the
exiles and "remittance men," or of the engineers who are building
the railroad from Cape Town to Cairo, or of any lack of interest
which the East Coast presents in its problem of trade, of conquest,
and of, among nations, the survival of the fittest.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Congo and Coasts of Africa
by Richard Harding Davis

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