The harbor itself is an excellent one and the bay is twenty-two miles along, but there is only one landing-pier, and that such a pier as would be considered inconsistent with the dignity of the Larchmont Yacht Club.  To the town itself Portugal has been content to contribute as her share the gatherers of taxes, collectors of customs and dispensers of official seals.  She is indifferent to the fact that the bulk of general merchandise, wine, and machinery that enter her port is brought there by foreigners.  She only demands that they buy her stamps.  Her importance in her own colony is that of a toll-gate at the entrance of a great city.

Lorenco Marquez is not a spot which one would select for a home.  When I was first there, the deaths from fever were averaging fifteen a day, and men who dined at the club one evening were buried hurriedly before midnight, and when I returned in the winter months, the fever had abated, but on the night we arrived twenty men were robbed.  The fact that we complained to the police about one of the twenty robberies struck the commandant as an act of surprising and unusual interest.  We gathered from his manner that the citizens of Lorenco Marquez look upon being robbed as a matter too personal and selfish with which to trouble the police.  It was perhaps credulous of us, as our hotel was liberally labelled with notices warning its patrons that “Owing to numerous robberies in this hotel, our guests will please lock their doors.”  This was one of three hotels owned by the same man.  One of the others had been described to us as the “tough” hotel, and at the other, a few weeks previous, a friend had found a puff-adder barring his bedroom door.  The choice was somewhat difficult.

On her way from Lorenco Marquez to Beira our ship, the Kanzlar, kept close to the shore, and showed us low-lying banks of yellow sand and coarse green bushes.  There was none of the majesty of outline which reaches from Table Bay to Durban, none of the blue mountains of the Colony, nor the deeply wooded table-lands and great inlets of Kaffraria.  The rocks which stretch along the southern coast and against which the waves break with a report like the bursting of a lyddite shell, had disappeared, and along Gazaland and the Portuguese territory only swamps and barren sand-hills accompanied us in a monotonous yellow line.  From the bay we saw Beira as a long crescent of red-roofed houses, many of them of four stories with verandas running around each story, like those of the summer hotels along the Jersey coast.  It is a town built upon the sands, with a low stone breakwater, but without a pier or jetty, the lack of which gives it a temporary, casual air as though it were more a summer resort than the one port of entry for all Rhodesia.  It suggested Coney Island to one, and to others Asbury Park and the board-walk at Atlantic City.  When we found that in spite of her Portuguese flags and naked blacks, Beira reminded us of nothing except