IN MOMBASA ship north of Zanzibar and thirty days’ sailing from New York.

So far, most of my travels in Africa have been in the sands, with only a patch of green now and then. I was close to the Sahara in Morocco, and I travelled many hundreds of miles over it while in Algeria and Tunisia.

In Tripoli my eyes were made sore by the glare of the Libyan wastes and their dust blew across the Nile valley during my stay in Egypt and the British Sudan. The Arabian desert was on both sides of us as we came down the Red Sea and its sands several times covered the ship. We had the rockiest of all deserts in southern Arabia while that of Italian Somaliland was not any better.

Here at Mombasa we are in the luxuriant tropics where the surroundings remind me of Solomon’s song. All nature seems joyful. The rain has conquered the sun and there are mosses, vines, and trees everywhere, The shores of the mainland are bordered with coconuts, we have mighty baobab trees loaded with green scattered over the island, and even its cliffs are moss grown.

A jungle of green on a foundation of coral, Mombasa is only a mile or so wide and three miles in length, but it rises well up out of the sea and is so close to the continent that one can almost hear the wind blow through the coco¬ nut groves over the way. On the island itself the jungle has been cut up into wide roads. There is a lively town with a polyglot population at one end of it, and the hills are spotted with the homes of the British officials. The is¬ land has two good harbours, a little one and a big one. The little one, which is in the main part of the town, is fre¬ quented by small craft. The big one could hold all the ships that sail the East Coast, and the people here say it 237