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Chula (Tula) is­land


Chula (Tula )Is­land.-This is­land is sec­ond in point of pop­u­la­tion: it is 57 miles from Kismayu, is 11 miles in breadth, 8t miles in length. The wa­ter is the sweet­est on the is­lands. There are two vil­lages on this is­land, the one Tula, the other a mile or so dis­tant, M’­doa. Coco-nuts grow ex­tremely well, and with some en­cour­age­ment would be­come prof­itable. The is­land pos­sesses a large tomb, said to be Por­tuguese, made with a ce­ment the se­cret of which has been lost. The dec­o­ra­tions are not Is­lamic. Leg­end has it that five hun­dred Por­tuguese men and women landed on the is­land, hav­ing been dri­ven out of Ara­bia: more prob­a­bly they were ex­pelled from Mom­basa or Lamu by the Arabs in the eigh­teenth cen­tury. A house, the in­te­rior dec­o­ra­tions of which are sin­gu­larly del­i­cate, is shown as of great age. It was built with slave labour by the great-aunt of a liv­ing in­hab­i­tant. This woman was of the De­farad clan of the Tunni tribe and the Barawa peo­ple of the Be­nadir coast. The Tunni and Re­hawen fought with the So­ma­lis at Giumbo and were dri­ven north. The three stone mosques are in good re­pair: the in­te­ri­ors are dec­o­rated with plates: in many cases the de­sign of this china is mod­ern. On the main­land a few hun­dred yards from the shore, at Ki­tuni, is the ruin of a con­sid­er­able mosque, the in­te­rior of which is dec­o­rated with the 114 Suras of the Ko­ran carved in the plas­ter. On the right-hand bank, at the mouth of the Anole Creek, are more ru­ins, like­wise on the left-hand side at Ku­dai. It is sub­mit­ted that these main­land set­tle­ments were in their con­cep­tion cus­tom-houses, and, as re­la­tions with the Galla or Wa-Nyika were es­tab­lished, be­came vil­lages. The cus­tom is well known; the grain was placed some dis­tance away, the tusk was brought: if ei­ther the price or the ar­ti­cle did not suf­fice, the dis­sat­is­fied warned away the other by hos­tile demon­stra­tion. Man­i­festly the is­lander could not barter in safety on his is­land.