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Updated: June 15, 2025
There were walkers and water-carriers, with goat-skins full on their back; and fruit-sellers and orange-girls; and ourselves and others driving at full gallop, regardless of all the Copts, Abyssinians, Greeks, Turks, Parsees, Nubians, and Jews, which crowded the path.
And in the street the donkey drivers, the water-carriers, the fishmongers, the venders of broiled meats, of baked breads, of beans, of cream, all cried: "Mister Turtle, Mister Turtle! Try our wares. Buy something for your poor stubborn beast that is pining away!" And, in truth, the turtle continued to shrink.
"For the love of Christ, give me to drink," he said, recognizing them as the knights at whom he had mocked as water-carriers. They gave him of the little they had left, and while they and their horses drank the rest themselves, saw him rush down the hill refreshed, shaking his red sword.
There are spare horses led by grooms, and watermen and water-carriers march alongside their bullocks. Among the miscellaneous concourse appears the head-servant, or khansamah, mounted generally on some steed discarded by his master, while his inferiors either walk on foot, or get a lift in a hackery, or on the back of a camel; but all trudge along with cheerfulness, and alacrity.
Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work.
To increase the distress, bakers were forbidden to furnish them with bread, and water-carriers to supply them with water. Thirty or more persons were exiled, imprisoned, or bastinadoed, on no other charge than their faith. Many were compelled to dissolve partnerships, and bring their accounts to a forced settlement, involving their utter ruin.
Far below, the soft mist of the dawn still lay upon the city, whence the distant cries of the water-carriers and fruitsellers came echoing up from the waking streets, the call of the women to one another from the housetops, and now and then the neighing of a horse far out upon the meadows; while the fleet swallows circled over all in swift wide curves, with a silvery fresh stream of unceasing twittering music.
Yet they are a pleasant crowd to be amongst, in spite of insect-life, water-carriers, and bulky pack-saddles, and there is an exhaustless store of interest, not alone in the wares they have for sale, and in the trades they ply, but more than all in the faces, so often keen and alert, and still more often bright and smiling. One typical example of Moorish methods of shopping, and I have done.
Now, it would be a long task to tell of the work which Israel did in his new calling: how he regulated the market dues, and appointed a Mut'hasseb, a clerk of the market, to collect them so many moozoonahs for every camel sold, so many for every horse, mule, and ass, so many floos for every fowl, and so many metkals for the purchase and sale of every slave; how he numbered the houses and made lists of the trades, assessing their tribute by the value of their businesses so much for gun-making, so much for weaving, so much for tanning, and so on through the line of them, great and small, good and bad, even from the trades of the Jewish silversmiths and the Moorish packsaddle-makers down to the callings of the Arab water-carriers and the ninety public women.
In a crowd men always tend to the same level, and, on general questions, a vote, recorded by forty academicians is no better than that of forty water-carriers.
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