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Then he led him back to the dais, where he presented to him the ladies of his family, ordering the retainers, of whom about a score were gathered in the hall, to place two piles of sheepskins near the fire. On one of these he sat down, and motioned to Archie to take his place on the other his own chair being removed to a corner. Then, through the medium of Ronald, the conversation began.
When at length our thirst was satisfied, horses were brought to us, serviceable and docile little beasts with sheepskins for saddles and loops of hide for stirrups.
Was it so in those strange old times that the eleventh chapter of Hebrews told of? when men, and women, were stoned, and sawn asunder, and slain with the sword, and wandered like wild animals in sheepskins and goatskins and in dens and caves of the earth? all for the name of Jesus. But if they suffered once, they were happy now. Better anything, at all events, than to deny that name!
By listening to such a glowing account of the place, Fred's mind grew so excited that he would have liked to have started at once for the lake, and feasted his eyes upon the wonders; but the butcher's was now reached, and the fat dame in the shop having been told of the cause of their visit, "Willum," the boy, was called, who armed himself with a skewer, and then took the lads to a vile-smelling shed, where lay a heap of sheepskins and a bullock's hide, and from the insides of these, and, by poking out from amongst tendons of an old shin bone, the little tin box was soon filled with the great, fat, white maggots, the end of whose life, the beginning, and the middle, and all the rest of it, seemed to be to keep continually in motion with one incessant wriggle.
The monkey-like Hottentot sat in front and directed the camel, while I accommodated myself as best I could on the sheepskins behind. Luckily they were thick and soft, for Jana's pinch was not exactly that of a lover.
I found however two strange manufactures for so inland a place, sail-cloth and streamers for ships; and I observed them making some saddle-cloths, and dressing sheepskins: but upon the whole, the busy hand of industry seemed to be quite slackened. There was at this time a company of players performing at Lichfield, The manager, Mr. Stanton, sent his compliments, and begged leave to wait on Dr.
Delaying as much as possible, to let our servants up, we reached Pandras at last, and found all the inhabitants turned out to see our arrival; they were dressed in long woollen coats and sheepskins, and looked something between Russians and Tartars, with a strong flavour of the Esquimaux, as depicted by Polar voyagers.
Then I put a stone in my straw hat, pulled the flap of my fur cap over my neck and eyes, put my revolver ready to my hand, and snuggled well down among the sheepskins. I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger.
We managed to get some deer's antlers, a gray wolf's skin for the bride's tootsies, and several colored sheepskins, which we had bought from a Mexican horse herd going up the trail that spring. We killed a nice fat little beef, the evening before we started, hanging it out over night to harden.
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 Manchester cottons from all these hundreds of unknown and unknowable people, bound together by secret affinities, or intriguing against each other with secret hate, there emanates an atmosphere of mystery and menace more stifling than the smell of camels and spices and black bodies and smoking fry which hangs like a fog under the close roofing of the souks.
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