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The officer directs all the works, and is assisted occasionally by the friendly counsel of the Consul; so that a wonder of architecture will at last be reared amidst the crumbling-down places of this city of hovels. My Said returned this afternoon, bringing the baggage from The Wady. Five more slaves of Haj Ibrahim are sick.
Layard struggled against all kinds of difficulties; slept in hovels not sheltered from the rain; used his table as his roof by night; rode backwards and forwards from Nimroud to Mosul to expostulate with the vexatious interferences of a tyrannical old pasha; cheered the labours of his superstitious workmen; celebrated the discovery of certain remains with substantial feastings and music: made peace with a wandering Arab who threatened to rob him: these, and a thousand other adventures, recorded in his narrative of his discoveries, give an additional zest to the curiosity with which visitors enter this Nimroud room.
We agreed that there was no question but that we must spend the night where we were. The stock, after their long neglect and late milking, would be best left unmilked and unwatered till morning. As we must not leave the woman unwatched, we must sleep in the hut. We could bring in sedge mattresses and quilts from the hovels and sleep on the earth floor by the fire.
We now rambled about on the broad back of the hill, which, besides the Minster and ruined castle, is the site of some stately and queer old houses, and of many mean little hovels. I suspect that all or most of the life of the present day has subsided into the lower town, and that only priests, poor people, and prisoners dwell in these upper regions.
All the sides were open, and the floor was raised like a scaffold about a yard high, where they work many ingenious things of the barks of trees, and there also they sleep. In some of these hovels they work in iron, making very pretty heads for javelins, tools for making their boats, and various other things, the women working as well as the men.
In the warmer valleys, where bodily comfort has led the natives to use huts of thatch and open reeds, instead of the air-tight hovels of the cold, bleak plateau, tuberculosis is seldom seen. Of course, there are no "boards of health," nor are the people bothered by being obliged to conform to any sanitary regulations.
The ground plan is extremely simple. It consists of two rooms, oblong, and generally of the same size one to live in, the other to sleep in for the great majority of the squatters' hovels have no upstair rooms. At one end there is a small shed for odds and ends. This shed used to be built with an oven, but now scarcely any labourers bake their own bread, but buy of the baker.
This dark depression attracted Manuel somehow or other, with its rubbish heaps, its gloomy hovels, its comical, dismantled merry-go-round, its swings, and its ground that held so many surprises, for a rough, ordinary pot burgeoned from its depths as easily as a lady's elegant perfume phial; the rubber bulb of a prosaic syringe grew side by side with the satin, scented sheet of a love letter.
The good-byes at the station in Richmond; her mother's face, pathetic and drawn against the folds of her crape veil; Cousin Jimmy, crimson and jovial; Florrie's violent waving as the train moved away; Miss Jemima, with her smiling, pain-tortured eyes, flinging a handful of rice; the last glimpse of them; the slowly vanishing streets, where the few pedestrians stopped to look after the cars; the park where she had played as a child; the brilliant flower-beds filled with an autumnal bloom of scarlet cannas; the white-aproned negro nurses and the gaily decorated perambulators; the clustering church spires against a sky of pure azure; the negro hovels, with frost-blighted sunflowers dropping brown seeds over the paling fences; the rosy haze of it all; and her heart saying over and over, "There is nothing but love in the world!
There's Nevil dragged by a woman into one of their reeking hovels so that Miss Denham at Shrapnel's writes to Lady Romfrey because the woman's drunken husband voted for him at the Election, and was kicked out of employment, and fell upon the gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died starving, and the man sickened of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits with him!
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