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"Say them quickly, then, for you enter not my doors again, you wretched fellows, who have ruined all the water-carriers and all the bath people in Bagdad." "What is that you mean?" replied the caliph; "we are lost in mystery?" "What!" replied Yussuf; "have you not heard the decree of this morning?"
Baarak!" by black water-carriers from the Sus country, by veiled women, by negroes from Timbuctoo, by mules and camels, by men walking, men riding, without one sight or sound familiar, in a dream-world of intense life, recalling nothing so much as the Old Testament.
A couple of terrific charges followed; trees splintered and crashed, and the Indian allies fled in terror, freeing some of the water-carriers, who plunged at once into the bay and swam to the ship. The group of mangroves was a natural fortress, and the Dons failed to get in at the first rush.
Lope, however, like a good-natured, liberal gentleman, raised him up, returned all the money he had won, including the sixteen ducats the price of the ass, and even divided what he had left among the bystanders. Great was the surprise of them all at this extraordinary liberality; and had they lived in the time of the great Tamerlane, they would have made him king of the water-carriers.
The chattering crowds in the wayside stations, their bright-coloured garments flaunting in the white sunlight the fruit-sellers, the water-carriers, were all as though they had stepped out of the pages of Kim that most excellent of Indian stories.
After the silence of the desert, the noise was terrific the shouts of the water-carriers, the yells of the native drivers of the swaying cabs, as they dashed at a reckless pace through the struggling and idling crowds. It was the most crowded hour of the day; the native town was wide awake.
Then I said in my mind, 'If I return to Cairo the folk will clap me in jail for their goods. So I fared with the pilgrims- caravan of Damascus to Aleppo and thence I went on to Baghdad, where I sought out the Shaykh of the Water-carriers of the city and finding his house I went in and repeated the opening chapter of the Koran to him.
Every morning between ten and eleven he is to be found in a balcony above the well at the back of the Dargah Mosque, and to-morrow I will lead you to him." "Every morning!" said Linforth. "What does he do upon this balcony?" "He watches the well below, and the water-carriers descending with their jars," said the Pathan, "and he talks with his friends. That is all." "Very well," said Linforth.
Water-carriers, street vendors, jinrikisha-runners, women with bound feet, children on foot, and children strapped on the backs of their mothers, crossed and recrossed, surged in and out. But the Honorable Percival concerned himself little with these petty details.
"What was it that the Prince said," he asked, "when the first of those water-carriers came down the steps and did not slip? He beat his hands upon the balustrade of the balcony and cried out some words. It seemed to me that his companion warned him of your presence, and that he stopped with the sentence half spoken." "That is the truth," Linforth's guide replied.
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