12 ZANZIBAR SLAVE-MARKET.
keepers, chiefly Indians, were respectful even to a painful
degree, rising as we passed them. The bazaar is very
abundantly supplied with vegetables, fruit, and dried
fish; little butcher-meat, but liquor-shops abound,
and water has to be purchased—the best quality being
carried fully a mile from a hot spring, which bubbles
from under rock, and tastes unpleasantly warm. Men
in the marketplace have an odd way of hawking about
their goods for sale. Goats, carved doors, beds, knives,
swords, &c., are all paraded up and down, and their
prices shouted out. The market for human beings is
a triangular space surrounded by rickety huts, thatched
with cocoa-nut leaves; and the parties of slaves (negro
men and women brought originally from the interior
of Africa), on being exhibited, are guarded by men
with swords. Some of the unhappy groups sit calmly
in the marketplace, looking very clean, well fed and
dressed, but with a depressed anxious look, saying to
you with their eyes, “ Buy me from this yoke of
slavery !” It is a very striking though most humiliating
sight to observe one of the Zanzibar rakish-looking
crafts (felucca-rigged) arrive from Ibo, on the mainland,
crammed with naked slaves for the market—all
as silent as death. The Arab owners, gaily dressed,
stand at the stem, and one holds the colours, in seeming
defiance of the British Consulate, as he sails past.
The price of slaves was low in 1860—only £3 each;
and many Arabs would have taken less, as Colonel
Rigby had released upwards of four thousand, who
became independent, living in a newly-made part of
the town, and gaining a livelihood by fetching water
and selling the produce of the island.
The Sultan was most polite in sending riding-horses
to any gentleman who might request them from his
stud of Arab descent. Colonel Rigby’s horse-attendant
took me to the spot. The m&noge consisted of
some forty horses and mares of Arab blood—twenty
of them packed so close in line under a long shed that
it would have defied any one of them to lie down.
They stood upon an incline of wood six inches higher
in front than behind, with heel-ropes so tight that the
poor animals could hardly raise their feet; many of
their tails shaved to the bone, others snipped round
with scissors; not a sound one amongst them—broken
knees, greasy and gummy legs, mangy skins, bags of
bone; and the outer one of all such a skeleton that I
listened to ascertain whether he breathed. Certainly
the mares looked more comfortable when picketed in
the morning in the open yard upon sand, and tied
loosely by the head, with nose-bags full of grain;
and the picture around them of domestic a.rdmak
had much the appearance of a home farmyard.
The climate of Zanzibar is very relaxing, owing to
the humidity of the air, a great amount of rain falling
during the year. The rain comes down in plunges,
pelting showers, or like squalls at sea, and in the intervals
any bodily exertion is attended with profuse
perspiration and lassitude. I may mention that we
pitched camp on the 13th September, for our Cape
Mounted Rifles, on a rising ground near a pond behind
the town, where they remained upwards of ten days.
On the 28th, when on the main coast of Africa, three
of these Tots were struck down with fever, a fourth
was seized soon after, and then a fifth—all on the
same day. Speke and I did not sleep in that camp,
and our health was not affected. Colonel Rigby men