and black races in South Africa and in Central Africa today is a crime against nature, as well as a political blunder of the first magnitude.

We left the end of the railroad at Bukama, in the Belgian Congo 2697 miles from Cape Town, and embarked on a little steamboat, propelled by a paddle-wheel at the stern; this took us down the river Lualaba, or Upper Congo, to Kabalo. The distance northward was only 340 miles, but we spent five days on the water, because travel was restricted mainly to the daytime, navigation by night being rendered unsafe because of the windings of the river and the shiftiness of its channel through a series of morasses, which on the map are marked as lakes. We found ourselves in one of these on the second day, the edges of the channel being indicated by piles, set in the floating vegetation, which stretched as far as the eye could reach to a rim of purple hills. The vegetation, tall reeds with a feathery top, consisted of papyrus, the stems draped with the pink flowers of the convolvulus. On the water also floated large buds of green that I failed to recognize until the sudden emergence of a crocodile gave me the cue—it was the lotus of Egypt. Papyrus and lotus! With a thrill of remembrance the imagination responds to the call of the past. From the Greek papuros comes our word paper; from the pith of the papyrus reed was made the first material for writing; 'bible' comes from the Greek word for a book, but originally biblos was used to designate the pith of the papyrus, the trade in which flourished greatly at Alexandria in the days of the Ptolemies. They held the monopoly in this writing material until Eumenes of Pergamum, in the second century B. C., introduced the use of calfskin and sheepskin for literary purposes; but even this competition did not cause the Ptolemies to abate their profiteering, for it is recorded that, when the Athenians were in need of wheat, the Ptolemy of that day refused to sell them any unless they presented him with the original manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripedes. The lotus bud was the motif for the capital of the Egyptian temple columns; indeed the papyrus and the lotus, by the appeal of their beauty, gave

an incentive to the first stone architecture conceived by man. At Sakkara, only ten miles south of Cairo, near the tomb of Zoser, a Pharaoh of the third dynasty, about the year 3100 B. C., has been unearthed recently a temple in which are stone columns simulating the papyrus. They are triangular in section, as is the stem of the papyrus, and their capital is essentially a swelling of the stem, like the sheath at the joint of a reed. The fluted column discovered in the same temple represents a bundle of stems with a band at each end. Such was the first Egyptian stone architecture, more than two thousand years earlier than the earliest known example of Greek fluted columns. The lotus idea likewise was taken from Egypt to Assyria and Greece, the beauty of the circular bud being linked with the thought of a wheel, the symbol of eternity.

Some of these ideas swarmed in my mind as our little vessel pushed her way through the floating masses of palmlike reeds, the papyrus being from eight to twelve feet high. We had to proceed slowly, as was evident from the fact that we met a small freight steamer that had been disabled by allowing its paddle-wheel to become entangled in the floating vegetation, or sud, the word from which Sudan is derived. A big pelican was disturbed and flew in front of us, alighting on the water at intervals as if meaning to show the way. Large pieces of papyrus, like small islands, were torn apart, and went floating down the river. Garlands of lotus clung to their edges. At last we emerged into a clear channel, and shortly we moored alongside the bank at a trading-post named Kadia. The day was drawing to a close; looking across the river, here about three hundred yards wide, we could see several mud islands on which native huts were grouped, an indigenous Venice, with a background of lordly palms, silhouetted against a superb sunset. The river gave back the beauty of the sky, and on its dark flood in stately slowness came the masses of papyrus, as much as a hundred yards long, gliding like floating islands across the portals of the dying day.

The next evening we stopped at Kamukesi, a Belgian military post. A lovely sunset had been succeeded by a moonless night; in these latitudes the day dies quickly and the sky of the tropic night is of velvet blackness. The lights of our little ship illumined the dark flood, on which lotus buds came floating past, singly and in festoons, the rate of their passage being marked exactly by the fixed stars in the water, like a firm faith in the flux of phenomena called life.

By this time the river had widened and straightened, so the next evening we continued on our way in the dark. Again a moonless night and a clear sky of velvet blackness. The reflections of individual stars could be recognized in the water as we proceeded northward, and we kept our course northward so steadily that the seven stars of the Great Bear seemed tied to our prow.

One more recollection of beauty I venture to record. At Dar-es-Salaam-Haven of Peace-lying sleepless in the hot night, I looked through a door to a verandah, under an arch, into a dark sky that showed a single star above the fronds of a stately palm. Why the curving stone, the arching tree, the profundity of the sky, and the light of a distant world should make an emotional appeal-that, my readers, I leave for you to decide.

We left the Congo at Kabalo and proceeded by train, during the night, to Albertville, 166 miles east, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, which is at an altitude of 2600 feet and five degrees south of the equator. Tanganyika is said to be the longest lake of fresh water; it has a length of 400 miles. At one time this lake was supposed to be a source of the Nile; later its outlet was sought in vain, until explorers ascertained that such small surplus of water as made a visible exit did so by the Lukuga River into the Congo. At Albertville we were examined by the Belgian doctor, who certified that we were free from contagious diseases, more particularly tuberculosis and trypanosomiasis! In the evening we went aboard a small steamer, which took us diagonally across the lake, 80 miles, to Kigoma. Five miles away, at Ujiji, is the

spot were Stanley met Livingstone on October 28, 1871. "Mr. Livingstone, I believe" were the polite words of greeting. Stanley's expedition came thither from Zanzibar, and not without much hardship, caused by malarial fever and lack of proper food. The first American flag to be seen in these parts was the one borne by the Welsh-American explorer, financed by James Gordon Bennett, of the 'New York Herald.' From the lake we traveled by rail to Dar-esSalaam, on the Indian Ocean, over the railroad that the Germans completed just before the Great War. The distance across this former German colony, now held by the British under a mandate, is 773 miles. At each terminus, and at the stations along the railway, the Germans erected substantial buildings, some of them of an imposing appearance, especially at Kigoma, which they meant to be an African Simla. They were severe in their treatment of the natives, and needlessly dictatorial to everybody. By the acquisition of this Tanganyika territory, the British possessions in East Africa have become a large dominion, covering a little more than a million square miles. The population consists of 12,000,000 natives, 18,000 whites, mostly British, and 60,000 Asiatics. More than half the British are in the Kenya Colony. The Asiatics are from India; they present a troublesome problem, because they are disliked by the Europeans and despised by the natives. Most of them are small traders, of the pedlar type, underselling the European merchants, non-productive middlemen, alien in race and religion, but claiming the status of British subjects. The acquisition of land by them in the Kenya Colony has been met by restrictions that have caused irritation on both sides. They first came to these parts in the wake of the coolies employed in railroad construction. In South Africa this year a bill was introduced in Parliament to establish the color bar, that is, to prevent natives and Asiatics from being employed in certain categories of skilled work in mines and factories; this merely legalized the existing practice in the mines of the Rand, but it applied to the whole Union, and aroused particular objection in the Cape Province, where

there is no color bar in industry, and where the parliamentary franchise is exercised irrespective of race or color. Later the wording of the bill was altered, the phrase "native and Asiatics" being dropped, and in the end this legislation was rejected, by vote of the Senate. Here we have another striking example of that clash of color which today is so large a factor in the world's unrest. In this context I may mention the fact that in the mines of the Rand I saw natives running 10-ton motor trucks, and in the Belgian Congo I saw them acting as engine-drivers on the railroad. The chief problem facing the whites is the natural increase of the native population as against the low birth-rate of the white immigrants. The dominant race will continue to dwindle in power as the native increases in numbers and intelligence.

We went on a local steamer to Zanzibar, on the island of that name, 60 miles from Dar-es-Salaam, and there waited eight days for a Messagerie steamer. Zanzibar is a picturesque Arab town set amid palms on a coral strand. Formerly it was synonymous with slavery, filth, and disease. Livingstone, writing in 1866, said:

The stench arising from a mile and a half, or two miles square, of exposed sand beach, which is the general depository of the filth of the town is quite horrible. At night it is so gross or crass one might cut a slice and manure a garden with it; it might be called Stinkibar rather than Zanzibar. No one can enjoy good health here.

Again he writes:

On visiting the slave market I found about 300 slaves exposed for sale, the greater part of whom came from Lake Nyassa and the Shiré river. All who have grown up seemed ashamed at being hawked about for sale. The teeth are examined, the cloth lifted up to examine the lower limbs, and a stick is thrown for the slave to bring, and thus exhibit his paces. Some are dragged through the crowd by the hand, and the price called out incessantly; most of the purchasers are Northern Arabs and Persians.