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Shortly, we came to the outskirts of the excited crowd, and beyond them saw the red furnace glow. "Semeelay! Semeelay!" warned Mohammed authoritatively; and the bystanders, seeing a white face, gave me passage. All of picturesque Mombasa was afoot Arabs, Swahilis, Somalis, savages, Indians the whole lot.
The business of the town is done here. The Arabic quarter lies back of it a maze of narrow alleys winding aimlessly here and there between high white buildings, with occasionally the minarets and towers of a mosque. This district harboured, besides the upper-class Swahilis and Arabs, a large number of East Indians.
This is the personal servant class. The members are of all tribes, with possibly a slight preponderance of Swahilis and Somalis. They are a very clean, well-groomed, self-respecting class, with a great deal of dignity, and a great deal of pride in their bwanas. Also they are exceedingly likely to degenerate unless ruled with a firm hand and a wise head.
They are big women, with soft velvety skins and a proud and haughty carriage the counterparts of the men in the white robes and caps. By the way, it may be a good place here to remark that these garments, and the patterned squares of cloth worn by the women, are invariably most spotlessly clean. These, we learned, were the Swahilis, the ruling class, the descendants of the slave traders.
Indeed, white marmalade jars seemed to be very popular wear. One ingenious person had acquired a dozen of the sort of safety pins used to fasten curtains to their rings. These he had snapped into the lobes, six on a side. We explored for some time. One of the Swahilis attached himself to us so unobtrusively that before we knew it we had accepted him as guide.
They also see that the drinking water is boiled and filtered and that the water bottles are filled each evening. Last of all come the porters, of whom we had eighty. There were Swahilis, Wakambas, Kikuyus, Masai, Minyamwezis, Lumbwas, Bagandas, Kavirondos, and doubtless members of various other tribes.
Swahili porters are considered the best, but there are not enough to go round, so we had to take Swahilis, Bagandas, Kikuyus, Kavirondos, Lumbwas, Minyamwezis, and a lot more of assorted races. Each porter carries sixty pounds on his head, and when the whole outfit is on the trail it looks like a procession of much importance. The Norfolk Hotel is the chief rendezvous of Nairobi.
In the distended lobes of their ears were stuffed cigarettes, horn snuffboxes, or flowers from the port town. They were followed by the camp servants in long, white robes, Beira-boys and Swahilis, driving before them a little flock of sheep. Parr, at the head of another squad of askaris, brought up the rear, riding a Muscat donkey.
And that is something the plains themselves refuse to permit you to do. Yet sometimes one must become a guide-book, and bespeak his reader's imagination. The country, then, wherein we travelled begins at the sea. Along the coast stretches a low rolling country of steaming tropics, grown with cocoanuts, bananas, mangoes, and populated by a happy, half-naked race of the Swahilis.
"Monumwezi hapa!" we yelled; and the command was repeated and repeated again by the headman, by his four personal assistants, by a half-dozen lesser headmen. Slowly the Monumwezi drew aside. We impressed on them emphatically they must stay thus, and went after, in turn, the Baganda, the Wakamba, the Swahilis, the Kavirondo, the Kikuyu. When we had them grouped, we went over them individually.
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