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Updated: May 31, 2025
They had to resort to the brook in the woods behind the Cotton house. But it was full of trout, and they had a glorious time that morning at least the Cottons certainly had, and Davy seemed to have it. Not being entirely bereft of prudence, he had discarded boots and stockings and borrowed Tommy Cotton's overalls. Thus accoutered, bog and marsh and undergrowth had no terrors for him.
When I reached the factory I found that the wages were being paid. After receiving their wages, the crowd of natives flocked through the factory gates to an open space in front of the storehouse. Here the different itinerant vendors had already arranged their goods on stalls or on the ground. There were all manner of cottons and silks, trinkets and hardwares.
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.
Water flowed everywhere; it boiled, it leaped, it murmured; it was black, white, blue, and green; it shrieked, it bubbled under the broom of the portress, a toothless old woman used to storms, who seemed to bless them as she swept into the street a mass of scraps an intelligent inventory of which would have revealed the lives and habits of every dweller in the house, bits of printed cottons, tea-leaves, artificial flower-petals faded and worthless, vegetable parings, papers, scraps of metal.
Yet there are infinite possibilities to the householder who has what is called the artistic instinct and the leisure and willingness to experiment, and experiments need not be limited to prints or to cottons, for wonderful combinations of colour are possible in silks where light is called in as an influence in the composition.
On the road were travellers never ending in their variety, and one father was mounted with a pack behind him, and on the top of the pack his little daughter clad in many coloured cottons, clasping him tight round the neck and peering inquisitively from behind his ear. About three p.m. we reached the Lim.
I gladly departed and gave Sheikha afterwards two sovereigns for her necklace. They said they would show me their clothes, but they never did. I have described the shape of these dresses, but I omitted to say that they are gaily trimmed with a kind of ribbon about two inches wide, made of little square bits of coloured silks and cottons sewn together.
Two or three of the camels were loaded with merchandise specially fitted for the wants of the natives: cheap cottons, tinware, trinkets, iron heads of tools, knives, cheap silk handkerchiefs and scarves for the women. These had been bought from some enterprising traders who had set up a store at Korti.
After a voyage of about thirty hours, the steamer brought up at the quay of Boulak, amidst a small fleet of dirty comfortless cangias, in which cottons and merchandise were loading and unloading, and a huge noise and bustle on the shore.
This was waiting in readiness for the six-mile drive at the end of the journey, and inside the large dress-box was a selection of well-chosen garments a white serge coat and skirt for bright weather; cottons and lawns for the warm days that must surely come; a velveteen dress for chilly evenings, blouses galore, and even a fur-lined cloak.
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