household of a great wazeer, recently
disgraced, will be offered for sale. One sees portly men of the city
wearing the blue cloth selhams that bespeak wealth, country Moors who
boast less costly garments, but ride mules of easy pace and heavy price,
and one or two high officials of the Dar el Makhzan. All classes of the
wealthy are arriving rapidly, for the sale will open in a quarter of an
hour.

The portals passed, unchallenged, the market stands revealed--an open
space of bare, dry ground, hemmed round with tapia walls, dust-coloured,
crumbling, ruinous. Something like an arcade stretches across the centre
of the ground from one side to the other of the market. Roofless now and
broken down, as is the outer wall itself, and the sheds, like cattle pens,
that are built all round, it was doubtless an imposing structure in days
of old. Behind the outer walls the town rises on every side. I see mules
and donkeys feeding, apparently on the ramparts, but really in a fandak
overlooking the market. The minaret of a mosque rises nobly beside the
mules' feeding-ground, and beyond there is the white tomb of a saint, with
swaying palm trees round it. Doubtless this zowia gives the Sok el Abeed a
sanctity that no procedure within its walls can besmirch; and, to be sure,
the laws of the saint's religion are not so much outraged here as in the
daily life of many places more sanctified by popular opinion.

On the ground, by the side of the human cattle pens, the wealthy patrons
of the market seat themselves at their ease, arrange their djellabas and
selhams in leisurely fashion, and begin to chat, as though the place were
the smoking-room of a club. Water-carriers--lean, half-naked men from the
Sus--sprinkle the thirsty ground, that the tramp of slaves and auctioneers
may not raise too much dust. Watching them as they go about their work,
with the apathy born of custom and experience, I have a sudden reminder of
the Spanish bull-ring, to which the slave market bears some remote
resemblance. The gathering of spectators, the watering of the ground, the
sense of excitement, all strengthen the impression. There are no bulls in
the _torils_, but there are slaves in the pens. It may be that the bulls
have the better time. Their sufferings in life are certainly brief, and
their careless days are very long drawn out. But I would not give the
impression that the spectators here are assembled for amusement, or that
my view of some of their proc