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 stocky little black men carry officialdom gratis, and the rest of the world and his wife according to tariff; all those things are the alphabet of Mombasa’s charm.  Arranged, and rearranged —­by chance, by individual perspective, and by point of view—­they spell fascination, attractiveness, glamour, mystery.  And no acquaintance with Mombasa, however intimate or old, dispels the charm to the man not guilty of cynicism.  To the cynic (and for him) there are sin—­as Africa alone knows how to sin—­disease, of the dread zymotic types—­and death; death peering through the doors of godowns, where the ivory tusks are piled; death in the dark back-streets of the bazaar, where tired policemen wage lop-sided warfare against insanitary habits and a quite impracticable legal code; death on the beach, where cannibal crabs parade in thousands and devour all helpless things; death in the scrub (all green and beautiful) where the tiny streets leave off and snakes claim heritage; death in the grim red desert beyond the coast-line, where lean, hopeless jackals crack today men’s dry bones left fifty years ago by the slave caravans—­marrowless bones long since stripped clean by the ants.  But we are not all cynics.

Last to be cynic or pessimist was Louis McGregor Abraham, proprietor of the Imperial Hotel—­Syrian by birth, Jew by creed, Englishman by nationality, and admirer first, last and all the time of all things prosperous and promising, except his rival, the Hotel Royal.