When I write the bank manager I'll ask him to keep my address a secret."

So we said good-by to Monty and left him on board, and wished we hadn't
a dozen times before noon next day, and a hundred times within the
week. The last sight we had of him was as the shore boat came
alongside the wharf and the half-breed customs officials pounced
smiling on us. My eyes were keenest. I could see Monty pacing the
upper deck, too rapidly for evidence of peace of mind--a
straight-standing, handsome figure of a man. I pointed him out to the
others, and we joked about him. Then the gloom 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