export, leave many large tenements unfinished or uninhabited,
while the aspect is as if a bombardment had lately

026--- taken place. Africa shows herself in heaps of filthy
hovels, wattle and daub and dingy thatch; in "umbrella-trees"
(ficus), acacias and calabashes, palms and cotton-trees, all
wilted, stunted, and dusty as at Cairo. We are in the latitude of
East African Kilwa and of Brazilian Pernambuco; but this is a
lee-land, and the suffering is from drought. Yet, curious to say,
the flora, as will appear, is here richer than in the well-
watered eastern regions.

Steaming onwards, at one mile off shore, we turned from south-
east to south-west, and presently rounded the north-east point of
Loanda Island, where a moored boat and a lantern showed the way.
We passed the first fort, Sao Pedro do Morro (da Cassandama),
which reminded me of the Aguada at the mouth of Goa Harbour. The
two bastions and their batteries date from A.D. 1700, and have
been useful in administering a strongish hint--in A.D. 1826 they
fired into Captain Owen. The next work is the little four-gun
work, Na. Sa. da Conceicao. We anchored in five fathoms about
1,200 yards off shore, in company with some fifteen craft, large
and small, including a neat despatch cruizer, built after the
"Nimrod" model. Fort Sao Francisco, called "do Penedo," because
founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered
batteries a la Vauban, carefully whitewashed and subtended by any
amount of dead ground, commands the anchorage and the northern
road, where strings of carregadores, like driver-ants, fetch and
carry provisions to town. A narrow causeway connects with the
gate, where blacks on guard lounge in fantastic uniform, and