onstrous
thing; as something as hot and heavy as a red flannel blanket, as a
buffalo robe. And when, on the following night, I found the
wind-screen was not in the air port, and that, nevertheless, I still
was alive, I knew we had passed out of reach of the Equator, and
that all that followed would be as conventional as the "trippers"
who joined us at the Canary Isles; and as familiar as the low, gray
skies, the green, rain-soaked hills, and the complaining Channel
gulls that convoyed us into Plymouth Harbor.

VII

ALONG THE EAST COAST

Were a man picked up on a flying carpet and dropped without warning
into Lorenco Marquez, he might guess for a day before he could make
up his mind where he was, or determine to which nation the place
belonged.

If he argued from the adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and walls of
cobalt blue, the palms, and the yellow custom-house, he might think
he was in Santiago; the Indian merchants in velvet and gold
embroideries seated in deep, dark shops which breathe out dry,
pungent odors, might take him back to Bombay; the Soudanese and
Egyptians in long blue night-gowns and freshly ironed fezzes would
remind him of Cairo; the dwarfish Portuguese soldiers, of Madeira,
Lisbon, and Madrid, and the black, bare-legged policemen in khaki
with great numerals on their chests, of Benin, Sierra Leone, or
Zanzibar. After he had noted these and the German, French, and
English merchants in white duck, and the Dutch man-of-warsmen, who
look like ship's stewards, the French marines in coal-scuttle
helmets, the British Jack-tars in their bare feet, and the native
Kaffir women, each wrapped in a single, gorgeous shawl with a black
baby peering from beneath her shoulder-blades, he would decide, by
using the deductive methods of Sherlock Holmes, that he was in the
Midway of the Chicago Fair.

Several hundred years ago Da Gama sailed into Delagoa Bay and
founded the town of Lorenco Marquez, and since that time the
Portuguese have always felt that it is only due to him and to
themselves to remain there. They have great pride of race, and they
like the fact that they possess and govern a colony. So, up to the
present time, in spite of many temptations to dispose of it, they
have made the ownership of Delagoa Bay an article of their national
religion. But their national religion does not require of them to
improve their property. And to-day it is much as it was when the
sails of Da Gama's fleet firs