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OUT OF TEE WORLD 111 orange colour. Old crones, with silvery hair and faces creased like medlars, tottered along with baskets on their feeble heads ; by them went girls, tall and with heads erect, on which were supported jars brimming with water ; and slowly gliding in and out of the crowd were veiled Turkish women, muffled in white like ghosts, showing nothing but the gleam of their dark eyes, and attended sometimes by a negro black as ebony. Occasionally the mass would be pressed together and parted by a patriarch with a beard of snow solemnly enthroned on a donkey between coloured saddle-bags ; and occa-sionally through the reluctantly formed opening a cart would come, drawn by bullocks, with their huge horns swaying. Then, as one watched and waited, other sights would reveal themselves. Little brown-legged boys would skip by with trays of coffee, which the cafés sent out to. the shops ; and bakers' men would appear, going more circumspectly, carrying on their heads long trays like planks, each with its row of loaves smelling fresh from the oven. Of Oriental bazaars that at Cairo is commonly supposed to be the most interesting, and of course in scale and in value and variety of merchandise this of Nicosia cannot for an instant be compared to it. But if the two are judged by the impressions they produce on the mind the advantage is the other way. In the bazaar at Cairo the stranger perforce wanders, accompanied by a banal conscious-ness of the neighbourhood of Shephard's Hotel, or

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