of the mouth of the Tana River, and not from Mombassa, a place
over 100 miles nearer Zanzibar. This conclusion we arrived at
from information given to us by a German trader whom we met upon
the steamer at Aden. I think that he was the dirtiest German
I ever knew; but he was a good fellow, and gave us a great deal
of valuable information. 'Lamu,' said he, 'you goes to Lamu
-- oh ze beautiful place!' and he turned up his fat face and
beamed with mild rapture. 'One year and a half I live there
and never change my shirt -- never at all.'

And so it came to pass that on arriving at the island we disembarked
with all our goods and chattels, and, not knowing where to go,
marched boldly up to the house of Her Majesty's Consul, where
we were most hospitably received.

Lamu is a very curious place, but the things which stand out
most clearly in my memory in connection with it are its exceeding
dirtiness and its smells. These last are simply awful. Just
below the Consulate is the beach, or rather a mud bank that is
called a beach. It is left quite bare at low tide, and serves
as a repository for all the filth, offal, and refuse of the town.
Here it is, too, that the women come to bury coconuts in the
mud, leaving them there till the outer husk is quite rotten,
when they dig them up again and use the fibres to make mats with,
and for various other purposes. As this process has been going
on for generations, the condition of the shore can be better
imagined than described. I have smelt many evil odours in the
course of my life, but the concentrated essence of stench which
arose from that beach at Lamu as we sat in the moonlit night
-- not under, but _on_ our friend the Consul's hospitable roof