with the wool-merchants, tanners, leather-merchants, silk-weavers,
armourers, and makers of agricultural implements.

Dark, fierce and fanatical are these narrow _souks_ of Marrakech. They
are mere mud lanes roofed with rushes, as in South Tunisia and
Timbuctoo, and the crowds swarming in them are so dense that it is
hardly possible, at certain hours, to approach the tiny raised kennels
where the merchants sit like idols among their wares. One feels at once
that something more than the thought of bargaining--dear as this is to
the African heart--animates these incessantly moving throngs. The Souks
of Marrakech seem, more than any others, the central organ of a native
life that extends far beyond the city walls into secret clefts of the
mountains and far-off oases where plots are hatched and holy wars
fomented--farther still, to yellow deserts whence negroes are secretly
brought across the Atlas to that inmost recess of the bazaar where the
ancient traffic in flesh and blood still surreptitiously goes on.

All these many threads of the native life, woven of greed and lust, of
fetichism and fear and blind hate of the stranger, form, in the _souks_,
a thick network in which at times one's feet seem literally to stumble.
Fanatics in sheepskins glowering from the guarded thresholds of the
mosques, fierce tribesmen with inlaid arms in their belts and the
fighters' tufts of wiry hair escaping from camel's-hair turbans, mad
negroes standing stark naked in niches of the walls and pouring down
Soudanese incantations upon the fascinated crowd, consumptive Jews with
pathos and cunning in their large eyes and smiling lips, lusty
slave-girls with earthen oil-jars resting against swaying hips,
almond-eyed boys leading fat merchants by the hand, and bare-legged
Berber women, tattooed and insolently gay, trading their striped
blankets, or bags of dried roses and irises, for sugar, tea or