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THE FIRE OF DESERT FOLK

streets, where the merchants offered for sale everything that is produced in the Tlemsen district—grain, fruit, vegetables, bournouses, fezes, turbans, slippers, saddles, charcoal, pots and pans. Near by, in improvised factories, yarn was being prepared and dyed red, green and yellow; furniture, pitchers, basins, straps and ropes were being made; elsewhere hides were being treated and logs cut up into planks and boards.

In the bazaar the crowd of Arabs, Berbers and Negroes that had come in from the country were pushing one another about to get in and bargain for the French wares being sold by the Jews in their small shops, where bright heaps of ribbons, artificial pearls, gilded copper necklaces, bracelets, ear-rings, looking-glasses, combs, thread, pins and a hundred other small articles lured the natives on. The women were especially attracted to these collections and often cautiously unveiled a second eye in sacrifice to these shopping opportunities.

Everywhere there were heaps of vegetables and fruit—grapes of many shades, pomegranates, golden pears, red apples, olives, splendid-looking plums and apricots, melons as transparent as amber, malachite-colored watermelons and immense cucumbers like twisted green snakes—and all of them struck the eye with their conglomerate mass of colors gleaming in the sun.

Some hundred paces beyond was the donkey-market, where these patient, sad, long-eared, faithful, wise and indispensable servants of the African native were being probed, studied and tried in every possible manner. Along the sides the rubbish merchants spread their wares upon stray mats on the ground. Was there anything that