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Updated: September 29, 2025
A smell of lavender pervaded the street, and the tidy little gardens were filled with all sorts of flowers. In front of the houses children were playing, and in most of the courtyards a foal was running about, with a bell tied round its neck.
Through the darkness of long-dead centuries the girl's stimulated fancies followed the man's words; she visualized the great glowing caldrons in which the fusing metals grew red and an intolerable white; saw men and women draw near, proud blue-blooded grandees on one hand, and the lowly on the other, with one thought; saw the maidens and ladies from the courtyards of the King's palace as they removed golden bracelets and necklaces from white arms and throats, so that the red and yellow gold might go with their prayers into the molten metals, enriching them, while those whose poverty was great, but whose devotion was greater, offered what little silver ornaments they could.
The finer and more numerous the houses, the more beautiful and elaborate the architecture of these separate, single buildings, the larger and more elaborate the courtyards, the more filled they are with trees, lilac-bushes, stone bridges, and other charming details. As one enters the compound, the building facing one is the residence of the mandarin himself.
Of the houses the passer-by sees no more than is seen in any other Oriental town: lofty windowless walls, with low entrances to the street, while the inner front looks upon open courtyards, which bloom with trees and flowers, and usually adjoin a pleasant garden.
The family of the bailiff who had replaced Michu had gone too. The senator's valet and Violette were the only persons beside the family at the chateau. The porter, two gardeners, and their wives were on the place, but their lodge was at the entrance of the courtyards at the farther end of the avenue to Arcis, and the distance from there to the chateau is beyond the sound of a pistol-shot.
"Speak to me kindly," the hand-organ implores; "I'm all alone!" it screams amid the throng; "thy Vows are all broken," it laments in dingy courtyards, "And light is thy Fame." And of hot summer afternoons, the Cry for Courage to Remember, or Calmness to Forget, floats in with the smell of paint and asphalt faint and sad through open office windows. Humiliation
It was cleaning up or tidying day at the Bastile; the cannons were furbished up, the staircases scraped and cleaned; and the jailers seemed to be carefully engaged in polishing the very keys. As for the soldiers belonging to the garrison, they were walking about in different courtyards, under the pretense that they were clean enough.
The courtyards and the verandahs were full of people, soldiers, syces, merchants with their packs, sweetmeat sellers, barbers; only the gardens were empty.
A gravedigger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
The Amir, it seems, had four principal wives, and an army of 200 men armed chiefly with daggers. Burton describes the streets of Harar as dirty narrow lanes heaped with garbage, and the houses as situated at the bottom of courtyards, closed by gates of holcus stalks. The town was proud of its learning and sanctity, and venerated the memory of several very holy and verminous saints.
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