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they passed Mombasa on their return. They are no longer in Africa now. The climate is too disintegrating for that, if you get I mean.

I was also one of the hosts, on the night he set foot on African soil, of Theodore Roosevelt. He advertised East Africa as no other could, and his work bears fruit to this day. Following him came a veritable flock of big game hunters, globetrotters, and nabobs and upper crusters. It was a poor night after that when one couldn't brace the Club bar with a couple of Lords and a Count or two, or wreck the cardroom with a pair of Honourables to help.

From Mombasa I went back to Aden as suddenly as I had come, and lived another six months there, amid the smell of the camels, on the barren lava rocks. Then again I went down the East Coast, this time past Mombasa, to Zanzibar.

Zanzibar, I felt, was my destiny. Here was the place I had heard tales about in the family circle, through all my boyhood days. I lived in the same Arab house- or rather collection of houses- as my predecessors had for fifty years before me, and weighed my ivory in the same compound within the confines of which Burton, Speke and Stanley had watched the packing of their loads and into which Tippoo Tib, the greatest ivory and slave raider of them all, had walked a hundred times at the head of strings of slaves bearing tusks of ivory on their heads. Here I bought more ivory, and cloves and copra, and sold American gold dollars for ornaments at half-a-dozen times their face value. I talked in Arabic and Kiswahili with Muhammed bin Khalfan, TippooTib's partner, and the other old slavers who were left, and had as my [[underlined]] hamals [[/underlined]] (porters) many of the old slaves and headmen who carried the Arabs' loads and guns in the old days.

Zanzibar I loved as few other places I have known. Possibly Africa returned my love for it, for when my time came to leave, I departed with the best health record, to confound those who had been afraid to send me to India, of any white man along the East Coast in my time. I had never had fever, and, moreover, had taken only 10 grains of quinine, altogether, in the years that I was out there.