CHAPTER II.
ARRIVAL AT ZANZIBAR ISLAND.
‘There is probably no part of the world where the English Government has so long had a Resident, where there are always some half-a-dozen merchants and planters, of which we know so little as of the capital and part of the kingdom of one of the most faithful of our allies, with whom we have for half a century (since 1804) been on terms of intimacy.’— TRANSACTIONS BOMBAY GEOG. SOC., 1856.
On December 2, 1856—fourteen long years ago!—we bade adieu to the foul harbour of Bombay the Beautiful, with but a single sigh. The warm- hearted Mr Lumsden saw us on board, wrung our hands with friendly vigour, and bade us go in and win—deserve success if we could not command it. No phantom of the future cast a shadow upon our sunny path as we set out, determined either to do or die. I find my journal brimful of enthusiasm. ‘Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood. Excitement lends unwonted vigour to the muscles, and the sudden sense of freedom adds a cubit to the mental stature. Afresh dawns the morn of life; again the bright world is beautiful to the eye, and the glorious face of nature gladdens the soul. A journey, in fact, appeals to Imagination, to Memory, to Hope,—the three sister Graces of our moral being.’[7]
The 18½ days spent in sailing 2400 direct miles ‘far o’er the red equator’ were short for our occupations. I read all that had been written upon the subject of Zanzibar, from Messer Marco Miglione to the learned Vincent, who always suspected either the existence or the place of the absurd ‘Maravi Lake.’ We rubbed up our acquaintance with the sextant and the altitude and azimuth; and we registered barometer and thermometer, so as to have a base for observations ashore. The nearest reference point of known pressure to Zanzibar was then Aden, distant above 1000 miles. Under all circumstances the distance was undesirable; moreover, violent squalls between the Persian Gulf and Cape Guardafui sometimes depress the mercury half an inch. I shall again refer to this point in Chapter V.
‘Father Frushard’ was genial, as usual, and under his command every soul was happy. We greatly enjoyed the order, coolness, and cleanliness of a ship of war, after the confusion, the caloric, and the manifold impurities of a Red Sea passenger-packet. Here were no rattling, heaving throbs, making you tremulous as a jelly in the Caniculi; no coal-smoke, intrusive as on a German Eisen-bahn; no thirst-maddened (cock-) ‘roaches’ exploring the entrance to man’s stomach; no cabins rank with sulphuretted hydrogen; no decks whereon pallid and jaundiced passengers shake convulsed shoulders as they rush to and from the bulwarks and the taffrail. Also no ‘starboard and larboard exclusiveness’; of flirting abigails tending portly and majestic dames, who look crooked beyond the salvation-pale of their own very small ‘set’; no peppery civilians rubbing skirts against heedless ‘griffins’; nor fair lips maltreating the ‘hapless letter H’; nor officers singing lullabies to their etiolated _enfants terribles_, and lacking but one little dispensation of nature—concerning which Humboldt treats—to become the best of wet- nurses. The ‘Elphinstone’ belonged not to the category ‘Shippe of Helle,’ one of whose squadron I have described in an old voyage to a certain ‘Unhappy Valley.’ We would willingly have prolonged our cruise with the jovial captain, and with the good fellows and gallant gentlemen in the gun-room, over many and many a league of waves.
Of course we had no adventures. We saw neither pirate nor slaver. The tract seemed desert of human life; in fact, nothing met our eyes but flying-fish at sea, gulls and gannets near shore. The stiff N. East trade never quite failed us, even when crossing the Line, and the Doldrums hardly visited us with a tornado or two—mere off-shore squalls. The good old heart of teak, then aged 33 years, made an average of 150, and an exceptional run of 200 knots, in 24 hours. This was indeed ‘gay sailing on the bosom of the Indian Sea.’ After 16 days (Dec. 18), before the solar lamp had been removed, our landfall, a long, low strip at first sky-blue and distance-blurred, had turned purple, and had robed itself in green and gold, with a pomp and a glory of vegetation then new to us. This was Pemba, one of the three continental islands composing the Zanzibarian archipelago: the Arabs call it Jazirat el Khazrá (Green Island), and no wonder! Verdant and fresh enough must this huge conservatory, this little and even richer Zanzibar, appear to their half-closed ‘peepers,’ dazed and seared by the steely skies and brazen grounds of Mángá[8] (Arabia generally) and Maskat (Muscat), and by the dreadful glare and ‘damnable blue’ of the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. We are soon to visit this emerald isle, therefore no more of it at present.
All had hoped to run in that night, but Fate or our evil deeds in the last life otherwise determined. The wind fell with the sun, and during the five minutes of crepuscule we anchored in the sandy bay-strand under Tumbatu Island, S.W. of Point Nunguwi (Owen’s Nangowy), the north cape of its big insular brother, Zanzibar. Like the items of this archipelago generally, it is a long cairn-shaped reef of coralline, with its greater length disposed N.S. This well-known norm of great peninsulas has been explained by a sudden change in the earth’s centre of gravity, which caused the waters to rush furiously from the northern hemisphere towards the south pole. As usual, the burning suns, the tepid winds, the sopping dews, and the copious rains clothe the thin soil with an impervious coat of verdure, overhanging the salt-waters, and boasting a cultivation that would make spring in green Erin look by its side autumn—rusty and yellow-brown.
We landed, and curiously inspected the people of Tumbatu, for we were now beyond Semitico-Abyssinian centres, and we stood in the presence of another and a new race. They are called by the Omani Arabs Makhádim— helots or serviles—and there is nothing free about them save their morals. Suspicious and fearful, numerous and prolific, poor and ill- favoured, they show all the advantages and the disadvantages of an almost exclusive ichthyophagism. Skilful in divination, especially by Báo or geomancy, they have retained, despite El Islam, curious practices palpably derived from their wild ancestry of the Blackmoor shore. They repair, for the purpose of ‘clear-seeing,’ to a kind of Trophonius cave, spend the night in attack of inspiration, and come forth in the morning ‘Agelasti, mæsti, cogitabundi.’ Similarly the Nas-Amun (Nasamone) slept, for insight into futurity, upon their ancestral graves. The wild highlanders of the East African ghauts have an equally useful den in their grim mountains; and on the West African coast the Krumen consult the ‘Great Debbil,’ who lives in a hole amongst the rocks of Grand Cavalla. The traveller who, _pace_ my friends of the Anthropological Society, postulates spiritualism or spiritism (as M. Allan Kardec has it), will save himself much mystification, and he will soon find that every race has had, and still has, its own Swedenborg.
The men of Tumbatu at their half-heathen wakes, lay out the corpse, masculine or feminine, and treat it in a way which reminds us of Hamlet’s (Act v. 1) ‘Where be your gibes now? your gambols, your songs?’ A male friend will say to his departed chum—
‘O certain person! but a few days ago I asked thee for cocoa-nut-water and tobacco, which thou deniedest to me—enh? Where is now the use of them?’
‘Fellow!’ a woman will address the dead, ‘dost thou remember making fierce love to me at such and such a time? Much good will thy love do me now that thou art the meat of ugly worms!’
Their abuse is never worse than when lavished by a creditor upon a defunct debtor.
The idea underlying this custom is probably that which suggested the Irish wake—a test if the clay be really inanimate. Nor would I despise, especially during prevalence of plague or yellow fever, in lands where you are interred off-hand, any precaution, however barbarous, against the horrors and the shudders of burying alive. Certain Madras Hindoos, after filling _its_ mouth with milk and rapping its face with a shankh or conch-shell, grossly insult, as only the ‘mild Hindu’ of Bishop Heber can, all its feminine relatives. The practice is also found in the New World. The Aruacas (Arrawaks) of Guiana opened the eyes of the corpse, and switched them with thorns; smeared the cheeks and lips with lard, and applied alternately sweet and bitter words. This was a curious contrast to the customs of the Brazilian Tupys and the Bolivian Moxos, who, according to Yves d’Evreux and Alcide d’Orbigny, met every morning to bewail their losses, even of their grandfathers and great- grandfathers!
As darkness came on we saw the sands sparkling with lights, here stationary like glow-worms or the corpusant; there flitting about like ignes fatui or fire-flies. Such was the spectacle seen by Columbus and Pedro Gutierrez (‘gentleman of the king’s bedchamber’) on the memorable night when Bahaman Guanaháni was discovered. The fishermen burn dry grass and leaves, and the blaze, like the Arabs’ ‘fire of hunting,’ which dazzles the eye of the gazelle, attracts shoals that are easily speared. Some carried torches in canoes: now the flame floated in crimpled water, which broke up its reflection into a scatter of brilliants; then it reposed upon mirror-like smooths, the brand forming the apex of a red pyramid which seemed to tremble with life, whilst the boat was buried in the darkness of death. And so ‘fishy’ are these equinoctial seas, that gangs of old women and children may be seen at Pemba, and on the coast, converting their body-clothes into nets, and filling pots, hand over hand, with small fry. I have seen them myself, although a certain critic says, ‘No.’
The people of Tumbatu, like the Greeks, have their good points. They are skilful pilots and stout seamen, diligent in gathering their bread from the waters, and comparatively industrious, considering their enervating, prostrating climate. Their low, jungly ledge wants the sweet element, compelling them to fetch it from Zanzibar—their mainland; hence travellers have described the islet as uninhabited. The people are mentioned as Moslems by Yakut (early 13th century), and this island of ‘Tambat’ was made a refuge for the inhabitants of Languja or Zanzibar. We inquired in vain about the fort which the Arabs are said to have built there. The skins of Tumbatu are sooty, the effect, according to some, according to others the concomitant, of humid heat. The reader must not charge me with ‘trimming’ between the rival schools of ‘race _versus_ climate, the cause of complexion.’ Many peoples betray but a modicum of chromatic and typical change. On the other hand, I have found an approximation of colour as well as of form between the Anglo-American and the Luso-Brazilian; and I have enlarged upon this chromatic heresy, if heresy it be, in the Highlands of the Brazil (Vol. i. chap. xxxviii.). Finally, when speaking of the permanence of type, it is well to bear in mind that our poor observations hardly extend over 2500 years.
The next morning placed us at the base of our operations, and we were on deck with Aurora. The stout ship ‘Elphinstone,’ urged by the cool land breeze, slid down the channel, the sea-river that separates the low- lying and evergreen Zanzibar Island from its reflection, the Mpoa-ni.[9] We were sensibly affected by the difference between the Sawáhil, this part of the East African sea-board which begins at the Juba River, and the grim physiognomy of Somaliland, Region of Fragrant Gums, with its sandy horrors of Berberah, and its granitic grandeurs of Guardafui, which popular apprehension refers to Garde à vous, and which Abyssinian Bruce, according to Ritter (Erdkunde, 2nd Division, § 8), altered, to Gardefan, the Straits of Burial.[10] We were in the depths of the ‘dries,’ as they are called in West Africa, in the local midwinter, yet this land was gorgeous in its vestment when others would be hybernating in more than semi-nudity.
Truly prepossessing was our first view of the then mysterious island of Zanzibar, set off by the dome of distant hills, like solidified air, that form the swelling line of the Zanzibar coast. Earth, sea, and sky, all seemed wrapped in a soft and sensuous repose, in the tranquil life of the Lotus Eaters, in the swoon-like slumbers of the Seven Sleepers, in the dreams of the Castle of Indolence. The sea of purest sapphire, which had not parted with its blue rays to the atmosphere—a frequent appearance near the equator—lay basking, lazy as the tropical man, under a blaze of sunshine which touched every object with a dull burnish of gold. The wave had hardly energy enough to dandle us, or to cream with snowy foam the yellow sandstrip which separated it from the flower- spangled grass, and from the underwood of dark metallic green. The breath of the ocean would hardly take the trouble to ruffle the fronds of the palm which sprang, like a living column, graceful and luxuriant, high above its subject growths. The bell-shaped convolvulus (Ipomæa Maritima), supported by its juicy bed of greenery, had opened its pink eyes to the light of day, but was languidly closing them, as though gazing upon the face of heaven were too much of exertion. The island itself seemed over-indolent, and unwilling to rise; it showed no trace of mountain or crag, but all was voluptuous with gentle swellings, with the rounded contours of the girl-negress, and the brown-red tintage of its warm skin showed through its gauzy attire of green. And over all bent lovingly a dome of glowing azure, reflecting its splendours upon the nether world, whilst every feature was hazy and mellow, as if viewed through ‘woven air,’ and not through vulgar atmosphere. Most of my countrymen find monotony in these Claude-Lorraine skies, with the pigment and glazing _on_. I remember how in Sind they used to bless the storm-cloud, and stand joyously to be drenched in the rain which rarely falls in that leather-coloured land. Zanzibar, however, must be seen on one of her own fine days: like Fernando Po and Rio de Janeiro, the beauty can look ‘ugly’ enough when she pleases.
As we drew nearer and vision became more distinct, we found as many questions for the pilot as did Vasco da Gama of old. Those prim plantations which, from the offing, resembled Italian avenues of oranges, the tea-gardens of China, the vines of romantic Provence, the coffee plantations of the Brazil, or the orange-yards of Paraguay, were the celebrated clove-grounds, and the largest, streaking the central uplands, were crown property. We distinctly felt a heavy spicy perfume, as if passing before the shop of an Egyptian ‘attar,’ and the sensorium was not the less pleasantly affected, after a hard diet of briny N.E. Trade. Various legends of hair-oil rubbed upon the bulwarks have made many a tricked traveller a shallow infidel in the matter of smelling the land. But we soon learned that off Zanzibar, as off ‘Mozámbic,’ the fragrant vegetation makes old Ocean smile, pleased with the grateful smell, as of yore. The night breeze from the island is cool and heavy with clove perfume, and European residents carefully exclude the land- wind from their sleeping-rooms.
For a little while we glided S. by E. along the shore, where the usual outlines of a city took from it the reproach of being a luxuriant wilderness. The first was ‘Bayt el Ra’as, a large pile, capped with a dingy pent-house of cajan (cocoa leaves), and backed by swelling ground— here bared for cultivation, there sprinkled with dense dark trees, masses of verdure sheltering hut and homestead. Followed at the distance of a mile, the Royal Cascine and Harem of Mto-ni, the Rivulet.[11] Our ancient ally ‘Sayyid Said, Imam of Maskat and Sultan of Zanzibar and the Sawahil,’ had manifestly not attempted African copies of his palaces in Arabian Shináz and Bat’hah, pavilions with side-wings and flanking towers, the buildings half castle half château, so much affected by the feudal lords of Oman. He preferred an Arabo-African modification, here valuable for ‘sommer-frisch.’
The demesne of Mto-ni has a quaint manner of Gothic look, pauperish and mouldy, like the schloss of some duodecimo Teutonic Prince, or long- titled, short-pursed, placeless, and pensionless German Serenity in the days now happily gone by, when the long drear night of German do- nothingness has fled before the glorious daybreak of 1866-1870. We can distinguish upon its long rusty front a projecting balcony of dingy planking, with an extinguisher-shaped roof, dwarfed by the luxuriant trees arear, and by the magnificent vegetation which rolls up to its very walls. Mto-ni takes its name from a runnel which, draining the uplands, supplies the ‘Palace,’ and trickles through a conduit into the sea. We shall presently visit it.
Entering the coral reef which defends this great store-house of Eastern Intertropical Africa, I remarked that the lucent amethyst of the waters was streaked and patched with verdigris green; the ‘light of the waves’ being caused by shoals, whose golden sands blended with the blue of heaven. The ‘Passes of Zanzibar’ reminded me in colouration of the ‘Gateways of Jeddah,’ and as the coral reefs cut like razors, they must be threaded with equal care. So smooth was the surface within the walls, that each ship, based upon a thread of light, seemed to hover over its own reflected image.
And now we could distinguish the normal straight line of Arab town, extending about a mile and a half in length, facing north, and standing out in bold relief, from the varied tints and the grandeur of forest that lay behind. A Puritanical plainness characterized the scene— cathedrals without the graceful minarets of Jeddah, mosques without the cloisters of Cairo, turrets without the domes and monuments of Syria; and the straight stiff sky-line was unrelieved except by a few straggling palms. In the centre, and commanding the anchorage, was a square-curtained artless fort, conspicuous withal, and fronted by a still more contemptible battery. To its right and left the Imam’s palace, the various Consulates, and the large parallelogrammic buildings of the great, a tabular line of flat roofs, glaring and dazzling like freshly white-washed sepulchres, detached themselves from the mass, and did their best to conceal the dingy matted hovels of the inner town. Zanzibar city, to become either picturesque or pleasing, must be viewed, like Stambul, from afar.
We floated past the guard-ship, an old 50-gun frigate of Dutch form and Bombay build, belonging to ‘His Highness the Sayyid;’ it was modestly named Shah Allum (Alam), or ‘King of the World.’ The few dark faces on board bawled out information unintelligible to our pilot, and showed no colours, as is customary when a foreign cruizer enters the port. We set this down to the fact of their being blacks—‘careless Ethiopians.’ But flags being absent from all the masts, and here, as in West Africa and in the Brazil, every ‘house’ flies its own bunting, we decided that there must be some cause for the omission, and we became anxious accordingly.
But not for such small matter would the H. E. I. C.’s ship-of-war ‘Elphinstone’ have the trouble of casting loose and of loading her guns gratis. With the Sayyid’s plain blood-red ensign at the main, and with union-jack at the fore, she cast anchor in Front Bay, and gallantly delivered her fire of 21. Thereupon a gay bunting flew up to every truck ashore and afloat, whilst the brass carronades of the ‘Victoria,’ another item of the Maskat navy, roared a response of 22, and, curious to say, did not blow off a single gunner’s arms. We had arrived on the fortieth or last day of Moslem mourning; and the mourning was for Sayyid Said, our native friend and ally, who had for so many years been calling for volunteers and explorers, and from whom the East African expedition had been taught to expect every manner of aid except the pecuniary.
We lost no time in tumbling into a gig and in visiting the British Consulate, a large solid pile, coloured like a twelfth-cake, and shaped like a claret-chest, which lay on its side, comfortably splashed by the sea. Lieut.-Colonel Atkins Hamerton, of the Indian Army, H.B.M.’s Consul and H. E. I. C.’s agent, to whom I was directed to report arrival, was now our mainstay, but we found him in the poorest state of health. He was aroused from lethargy by the presence of strangers, and after the usual hospitable orders my letters were produced and read. Those entrusted to me by Lord Elphinstone, and by his Eminence the learned and benevolent Cardinal Wiseman, for whom he had the profoundest respect, pleased him greatly; but he put aside the missive of the Royal Geographical Society, declaring that he had been terribly worried for ‘copy’ by sundry writing and talking members of that distinguished body.
I can even now distinctly see my poor friend sitting before me, a tall, broad-shouldered, and powerful figure, with square features, dark, fixed eyes, hair and beard prematurely snow-white, and a complexion once fair and ruddy, but long ago bleached ghastly pale by ennui and sickness. Such had been the effect of the burning heats of Maskat and ‘the Gulf,’ and the deadly damp of Zanzibar, Island and Coast. The worst symptom in his case—one which I have rarely found other than fatal—was his unwillingness to quit the place which was slowly killing him. At night he would chat merrily about a remove, about a return to Ireland; he loathed the subject in the morning. To escape seemed a physical impossibility, when he had only to order a few boxes to be packed, and to board the first home-returning ship. In this state the invalid requires the assistance of a friend, of a man who will order him away, and who will, if he refuses, carry him off by main force.
Our small mountain of luggage was soon housed, and we addressed ourselves seriously to the difficulties of our position. That night’s rest was not sweet to us. I became as the man of whom it was written—
‘So coy a dame is Sleep to him, That all the weary courtship of his thoughts Can’t win her to his bed.’
After the disaster in Somali-land, I was pledged, at all risks and under all circumstances, to succeed; and now St Julian, host and patron of travellers, had begun to show me the rough side of his temper. The Consul was evidently unfit for the least exertion. He had in his ‘godowns’ dozens of chests and cases which he had not the energy to open. H. H. Sayyid Said had left affairs in a most unsatisfactory state. His eldest son, the now murdered Sayyid Suwayni, heir to Maskat, and famous as an anglophobe, had threatened to attack Zanzibar; a menace which, as will afterwards appear, he attempted to carry out. The cadet Sayyid Majid, installed by his father chief of the African possessions, was engrossed in preparations for defence. Moreover, this amiable young prince having lately recovered from confluent small-pox, an African endemic which had during the last few years decimated the islanders, was ashamed to display a pock-marked face to the ‘public,’ ourselves included. The mainland of Northern Zanzibar about Lamu was, as usual on such occasions, in a state of anarchy. Every man seized the opportunity of slaying his enemy, or of refusing to pay his taxes. An exceptionally severe drought had reduced the southern coast of Zanzibar to a state of famine.
Briefly, the gist of the whole was that I had better return to Bombay. But rather than return to Bombay, I would have gone to Hades on that 20th of December, 1856.
NOTE.
Since these pages were penned the _Bombay Gazette_ of November 11, 1870, announced the death of H. H. Sayyid Majid, Sultan of Zanzibar, and the succession of his brother—Sayyid Burghush.
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Footnote 7:
Somewhat boisterous, but true. (Note 14 years afterwards.)
Footnote 8:
Literally rock, rocky ground. Hence the Arabs are called Wámánga. Mr Cooley (‘Inner Africa Laid Open,’ p. 61) blunders pitiably about this word.
Footnote 9:
This is the ‘Poane’ of ‘O Muata Cazembe’ (p. 323), and there rightly translated, ‘Costa de Zanzibar.’ Mr Cooley (p. 14, ‘The Memoir on the Lake Regions, &c., reviewed.’ London, Stanford, 1864) thus misleads his readers: ‘The Cazembe knew the name of only one place on the coast—Mpoáni, near the Querimba Islands.’ The word literally means ‘on the coast,’ or simply ‘the coast.’ In the Zangian dialects the terminative ‘-ni’ has two senses. Now it is a locative, signifying on, in, by, or near, as, e.g., Nyumba-ni, ‘at home’ (in the house); Mfu’ua-ni, at the place near the Mfu’u tree. Then it is almost pleonastic, as Kisiwa-ni, ‘the island,’ and Kisima-ni, ‘the well.’ Mpoa-ni, a word in general use, is a literal Kisawahili translation of the Arabic Sawáhil (plural of Sáhil), ‘the shores,’ strictly speaking between Mtangata and the Rufiji River. Hence, possibly, the Greeks drew their name, ‘Αιγιαλος.’ The latter is usually identified with the modern Arabic Sayf Tawíl, the long strand, not ‘bold or declining shore,’ as translated by Captain Owen. It extends southwards from the Ra’as el Khayl to Ra’as Awaz (Cape of Change) in the Barr el Khazáin (Ajan or Azania). Of the latter more in Sect. 1, Chapter V.
Footnote 10:
De Barros by a slip of the pen writes (Decades i. 5, 9) Guadrafu. I should explain the corrupted ‘Guardafui’ not as usual by ‘Cabo d’Orfui,’ but as a European version of Jurd Hafun,—highland or crest of Hafun. Jurd, in Arabic, means the mountain-top, opposed to the Wusut, shoulders or half-way slopes, and to the Sahl, or low lands. The modern Arabic name of the ancient Aromata Promontarium is Ra’as Asir, the captive headland, a term especially applied to the projection of land, some 2000 feet high, which, viewed from the south, extends farthest seaward to the north-east, as I saw when sailing from Zanzibar to Aden. Hafun, supposed to be the Mosyllum Promontorium of Pliny and the Opone of Ptolemy, the Khakhui of El Idrisi; the Jafuni of El Masudi; the Carfuna of other Arab geographers, and the Orfui of the moderns, means the surrounded, i.e. by water, because almost an island. Lieutenant Crittenden, I.N. (Aden, April 10, 1848. Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society), describes it as a headland of lime and sandstone nearly square, and 600 to 700 feet high. He remarks that after the Elephas Mons it is the only point on the coast concerning which there can be no mistake. The sites are thus—
Ras Asir (Guardaful) North Easternmost point of Africa N.lat. 11° 50′ 0″ Raper (11° 4′ 4″ Norris) Ras Hafun, Easternmost point of Africa N.lat. 10° 26′ 48″ " (10° 27′ 48″ ” ) —— —— —— —— —— —— Difference 1° 23′ 52″ 1° 13′ 16″ Lieutenant Carless, I.N., makes the difference of meridian arc 0° 4′ 50″
Footnote 11:
Yet we read of the ‘great river Matoney,’ and of ‘travellers crossing the great River Mtony.’ Mto, in the language of Zanzibar, is a river or a rivulet; also a pillow. The Quilimani River signifies simply kilima-ni, (water) from the mountain. The meaning of Quilimansi (the Obi—Webbe—Nile of Makdishu, Webbe Shebayli, of late christened the Haines River, and called Quilimancy by De Barros, from a settlement now unknown) is still under dispute. It cannot grammatically be made to mean ‘mountain-stream, or a mountain with streams,’ as Dr Krapf has it.