oom of the customs shed
swallowed us, and there was a new earth and, for the present, no more
sea.

The island of Mombasa is so close to the cocoanut-fringed mainland that
a railway bridge connects them. Like Zanzibar, it is a place of
strange delights, and bridled lawlessness controlled by the veriest
handful of Englishmen. There are strange hotels--strange
dwellings--streets--stores--tongues and faces. The great grim fort
that brave da Gama built, and held against all comers, dominates the
sea front and the lower town. The brass-lunged boys who pounce on
baggage, fight for it, and tout for the grandly named hotels are of as
many tribes as sizes, as many tongues as tribes.

Everything is different--everything strange--everything, except the
heat, delightful. And as Fred said, "some folk would grumble in hell!"
Trees, flowers, birds, costumes of the women, sheen of the sea, glint
of sun on bare skins of every shade from ivory to ebony, dazzling coral
roadway and colored coral walls, babel of tongues, sack-saddled donkeys
sleepily bearing loads of coral for new buildings, and--winding in and
out among it all--the narrow-gauge tramway on which trolleys pushed by
stocky little black men carry officialdom gratis, and the rest of the
world and his wife according to tariff; all those things are the
alphabet of Mombasa's charm. Arranged, and rearranged--by chance, by
individual perspective, and by point of view--they spell fascination,
attractiveness, glamour, mystery. And no acquaintance with Mombasa,
however intimate or old, dispels the charm to the man not guilty of
cynicism. To the cynic (and for him) there are sin--as Africa alone
knows how to sin--disease, of the dread zymotic types--and death; death
peering through the doors of godowns, where the ivory tusks are piled;
death in the dark back-streets of the bazaar, where tired policemen
wage lop-sided warfare against insanitary habits and a quite
impracticable legal code; death on the beach, where cannibal crabs
parade in thousands and devour all helpless things; death in the scrub
(all green and beautiful) where the tiny streets leave off and snakes
claim heritage; death in the grim red desert beyond the coast-line,
where lean, hopeless jackals crack today men's dry bones left fifty
years ago by the slave caravans--marrowless bones long since stripped
clean by the ants. But we are not all cynics.

Last to be cynic or pessimist was Louis McGregor Abraham, pro