Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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So, in your wonder at the utter strangeness of everything you overpay the driver some five piastres and begin to thread your way over the cobbles. All building is of stone, with a facing of cement, which once was bright-coloured, but has faded into faint blues and browns and greys; and if you look up and along the street of crumbling, flat-faced upper storeys broken by tiny balconies, you feel intensely the gentle irregularity and the mass of mellow colour. The one and the other is never seen in Australia, with our new shining-painted angularities of hardwood and bright nails and eaves and gables and sharp-sloping roofs. A gentle irregularity, in a street where boards thrust out and planks give way and vulgarly project themselves, where neither roofs nor fronts are flat, is unknown in our country.

What Mr. Wells calls "the inundating flood of babies" ebbs and flows in the streets. The Arab women, bare-legged, slovenly of gait, broad of person, with swaying, unstable bust, move up and down or sit in the doorways, or lounge and haggle over a purchase. Every hovel in the bazaars, with its low door and dark recesses, sells or makes something, and the Arab quarter is a succession of bazaars. The artificers squat at their work in brass or clay or fabric or gold; the greybeards sit at the doors with hubble-bubble and dream through the day in a state of coma. Fruits and dates, sweets and pastry, and Eastern culinary products that defy nomenclature by the Australian, are piled in an Eastern profusion. Sweets and pastry abound in excess and are curiously cheap. Toffee is sold from stands at every street-corner, and the quantity you might carry off for sixpence would be embarrassing. Pastry is made here of a flavour and lightness unexcelled by any English housewife. Sit at an open restaurant, call for a light lunch, and you will have a plate heaped with the most delicious meat and spice pastry and sugared fruits, for something less than the price of a street-stall pie in Australia, and with a glass of sherbet thrown in. The fineness of the fabrics sold (amongst bales of Manchester rubbish) will draw the better class of Egyptian woman into the bazaars of this east-end; they are beautiful in rich black silk from head to toe, with a delicate white yashmak; they have a regularity of feature and a complexion and a beauty of eye and of gait to make you look again. Nothing is lost to them by the setting through which they glide: the ragged bargainers, the sluttishness of the women, the unmitigated dirt of earth and asses and children and tethered goats, and water-carriers with their greasy swine-skins filled and shining. They offer an analogy to the stately mosque and minaret which lifts its graceful head above the squalid erections of the poor. And as futilely might the stranger pry into those features with his free curiosity as attempt an entrance to the Mosque unattended.