he
thousands of fires radiate heat-waves up through the air, heated already
stiflingly. We think of our comrades down in the river bed, reeking with
odours of killing and cooking, a combination of abominations unimagined
by me before.

We look down upon a collection of cart tops. The palm-woven mat covers
are massed in brown patches all over the sand, and the moving crowds are
between. We do not see the others. Have they found it as difficult as we
find it, we wonder, to get any disengaged enough to want to listen? At
last we reach the long stone aisle leading to the temple. On either side
there are lines of booths, open to the air but shaded from the sun, and
we persuade a friendly stall-keeper to let us creep into her shelter.
She is cooking cakes on the ground. She lets us into an empty corner,
facing the passing crowds, and one or two, and then two or three, and so
on till we have quite a group, stop as they pass, and squat down in the
shade and listen for a little. Then an old lady, with a keen old face,
buys a Gospel portion at half price, and folds it carefully in a corner
of her seeley. Two or three others buy Gospels, and all of them want
tracts. The shop-woman gets a bit restive at this rivalry of wares. We
spend our farthings, proceeds of our sales, on her cakes, and she is
mollified. But some new attraction in the gallery leading to the temple
disperses our little audience, to collect it round itself. The old
woman explains that the Gospel she has bought is for her grandson, a
scholar, she tells us, aged five, and moves off to see the new show, and
we move off with her.

There, in the first stall, between the double row of pillars, a man is
standing on a form, whirling a sort of crackling rattle high above his
head. In the next, another is yelling to call attention to his clocks.
There they are, ranged tier upon tier, regular "English" busy-bee
clocks, ticking away, as a small child remarks, as if they were alive.
Then come sweet-stalls, clothes-stalls, lamp-stalls, fruit-stalls,
book-stalls, stalls of pottery, and brass vessels, and jewellery, and
basket work, and cutlery, and bangles in wheelbarrow loads, and
medicines, and mats, and money boxes, and anything and everything of
every description obtainable here. In each stall is a stall-keeper.
Occasionally one, like the clock-stall man, exerts himself to sell his
goods; more often he lazes in true Oriental fashion, and sells or not as
fortune decides for