and woven stuffs were being unloaded that afternoon from groaning camels that had trod softly down from the Khanates to kneel in the Peshawar oval—to be reloaded with Manchester piece-goods and tread slowly back again before hot weather.
There were picturesque money-changers, too, in this bazaar—bearded and turbaned old Persians, wrapped in long and richly furred garments, sitting somnolent and prosperous in the sunshine, with loose heaps of coins from all the border countries before them. One even wondered if the rupees and annas, the unknown coins with crescents and Persian texts, and the yet more insidious rubles and copecks were real,—if they were not stage accessories and part of the tableaux rather than the visible capital and assets of genuine Shylocks.
Color was rampant in the shoe bazaar, the long line of cobblers' lairs strewn and strung over with peaked slippers and great strips of brightest red. green, and yellow leathers, and hung in the sunlight to make a braver show. In all that leather bazaar we could not find a pair of the braided leather sandals or buskins that at southern railway stations are sold as Saharanpur or Kashmir shoes, farther north are called Lahore shoes, and in Lahore are called Peshawar shoes. The Pathan public very generally wore the same conventional Mohammedan heelless slippers, with the pointed and curling bows and high sterns of antique junks. Some few wore wood or rawhide sandals fastened by heavy thongs, the most primitive and archaic of foot-gear. There was a narrow strip of railed-off,
