creaks when he expects it to be still. Considering how these same men could howl and spit, one would have anticipated more animation over the samples. Perhaps they sometimes showed it, but my memory is of calm celibates in dust-coats who stood idling in the sunshine before the doors of their cells, sipping coffee and exchanging anecdotes of a somewhat mechanical impropriety. Very good the coffee was, too, and the very blue sky and the keen air and the bright dresses of some natives raised for a moment the illusion that this courtyard was actually the academic East, and that caravans of camels were waiting with their snowy bales outside. There were other courtyards with ramifications of passages and offices, where the same mixture of light business and light refreshments seemed in progress—architectural backwaters such as one used to come across in the Earl's Court Exhibition, where commerce and pleasure met in a slack communion. These I did not care for, but the main courtyard was really rather jolly, and that British officer (had he visited it) could certainly have left his comment (whatever it was) unspoken.
Hence!
III
In the final stage I was in the thick of it again, though in a very different sort of thickness. Cotton was everywhere. The flakes of Minet el Bassal had become a snowstorm, which hurtled through the air and lay upon the ground in drifts. The cotton was being pressed into bales, and perhaps being cleaned too—it is shocking not to be sure, but the row was tremendous. The noise was
