ing: "Please come my shop! Please come my shop!" and our repeated "Jaos!" glanced harmlessly past his ear. To stop the whining pleas of the most persistent one we followed him down a side street, up a dark stairway, and on to a flat roof from which we reached inner rooms piled high with rugs and stuffs, where we might sit on floor cushions and toss glittering embroideries and rolls of shadowy-patterned Bokhara silks and sheeny stuffs from "silken Samarkand" to our hearts' content. In another shop men were busily ornamenting squares of dark cloth with showy Afghan waxwork. A pan of a white, waxy dough stood on a charcoal brazier beside each worker, who, laying a dab of the hot compound on the back of his hand as a palette, drew from it a long, viscous thread which he dropped in continuous arabesques and traceries over a faintly outlined pattern. This waxen relief was dusted over with silver, gold, or bronze powder before it cooled, and there resulted gaudy and tawdry curtains and table-covers, that in dusty, mildewed, and bedrabbled condition add to the fustiness and shabbiness of so many British-India hotel interiors.
There was a picturesque salt and corn bazaar in a vast open space, and the fragrance and the cheery music of popping corn drew us directly to the booth where, in a huge turban and tremendous trousers, the pop-corn man stirred the snapping kernels with a bunch of twigs in a great, shallow iron pan. The pan rested on the same rude mud oven and was furnished with the same layer of black sand as is used by hot-chestnut men in Peking and all North China.
