e park is as deserted as a cemetery; along
the principal streets stretch mosaic pavements formed of great
blocks of white and black stone, they look like elongated
checker-boards, but no one walks upon them, and though there are
palaces painted blue, and government buildings in Pompeiian red, and
churches in chaste gray and white, there are no sentries to guard
the palaces, nor no black-robed priests enter or leave the
churches. They are like the palaces of a theatre, set on an empty
stage, and waiting for the actors. It will be a long time before the
actors come to Mozambique. It is, and will remain, a city of the
fifteenth century. It is now only a relic of a cruel and barbarous
period, when the Portuguese governors, the "gentlemen adventurers,"
and the Arab slave-dealers, under its blue skies, and hidden within
its barred and painted walls, led lives of magnificent debauchery,
when the tusks of ivory were piled high along its water-front, and
the dhows at anchor reeked with slaves, and when in the
market-place, where the natives now sit bargaining over a bunch of
bananas or a basket of dried fish, their forefathers were themselves
bought and sold.

In the five hundred years in which he has claimed the shore line of
East Africa from south of Lorenco Marquez to north of Mozambique,
and many hundreds of miles inland, the Portuguese has been the dog
in the manger among nations. In all that time he has done nothing to
help the land or the people whom he pretends to protect, and he
keeps those who would improve both from gaining any hold or
influence over either. It is doubtful if his occupation of the East
Coast can endure much longer. The English and the Germans now
surround him on every side. Even handicapped as they are by the lack
of the seaports which he enjoys, they have forced their way into the
country which lies beyond his and which bounds his on every side.
They have opened up this country with little railroads, with lonely
lengths of telegraph wires, and with their launches and gunboats
they have joined, by means of the Zambesi and Chinde Rivers, new
territories to the great Indian Ocean. His strip of land, which bars
them from the sea, is still unsettled and unsafe, its wealth
undeveloped, its people untamed. He sits at his cafe at the coast
and collects custom-dues and sells stamped paper. For fear of the
native he dares not march five miles beyond his sea-port town, and
the white men who venture inland for