After the Ermida are more ruined houses and ragged plantations upon the narrow shelf between the sea-cliff and the sea:  they lead to the hot and unhealthy low town skirting the harbour, a single street with small offsets.  A sandy strip spotted with cocoa-nuts, represents the Praia do Bungo (Bungo Beach), perhaps corrupted from Bunghi, a praca, or square; it debouches upon the Quitanda Pequena, a succursale market-place, where, on working-days, cloth and beads, dried peppers, and watered rum are sold.  Then come a single large building containing the Trem, or arsenal, the cavalry barracks, the “central post-office,” and the alfandega, or custom-house, which has a poor platform, but no pier.  The stables lodge some half-a-dozen horses used by mounted orderlies—­they thrive, and, to judge from their high spirits, the climate suits them.  In Captain Owen’s time (A.D. 1826) there was “a respectable corps of cavalry.”

Passing the acting cathedral for the See of Angola and Congo, which deserves no notice, you reach the Quitanda Grande, where business is brisker.  There is a sufficiency of beef and mutton, the latter being thin-tailed, and not “five-quartered.”  Fish is wisely preferred to meat by the white man, “affirming that it is much easier digested;” and a kind of herring, and the sparus known upon the Brazilian coast as the “tainha,” the West African “vela,” and the French “mulet,” at times superabound.  All the tropical fruits flourish, especially the orange; the exotic vegetables are large and sightly, but tasteless and insipid, especially peas and radishes:  the indigenous, as tomatoes, are excellent, but the list is small.  Gardens are rare where the soil is so thin, and the indispensable irrigation costs money.  The people still “choke for want of water,” which must be bought:  there is only one good well sunk in the upper town, about 1840, when the Conde de Bomfim was Minister of Marine and the Colonies,—­it is a preserve for government officials.  Living in the native style is cheap; but cooks are hardly procurable, and a decent table is more expensive than in an English country town.  A single store (M.  Schutz) supplies “Europe” articles, of course at fancy prices, and here a travelling outfit may be bought.  It has been remarked that Loanda has no shop that sells “food for the mind;” this is applicable, not only to all East and West Africa, but to places far more progressive.  A kind of cafe-billard supplies a lounge and tepid beer.  The attendants in Portuguese houses are slaves; the few English prefer Cabindas, a rude form of the rude Kru-boy, and the lowest pay of the lowest labourer is 5d. per diem.