For the most part the traders seemed to be Berbers or of
evident Berber extraction, being darker and smaller than the Arabs, and in
some cases wearing the dark woollen outer garment, with its distinctive
orange-coloured mark on the back. Women and little children took no small
part in the market, but were perhaps most concerned with the sale of the
chickens that they brought from their homes, tied by the legs in bundles
without regard to the suffering entailed. The women did rather more than a
fair share of porters' work too. Very few camels were to be seen, but I
noticed one group of half a dozen being carefully fed on a cloth, because,
like all their supercilious breed, they were too dainty to eat from the
ground. They gurgled quite angrily over the question of precedence. A
little way from the tents in which hardware was exposed for sale, bread
was being baked in covered pans over a charcoal fire fanned by bellows,
while at the bottom of the hill a butcher had put up the rough tripod of
wooden poles, from which meat is suspended. The slaughter of sheep was
proceeding briskly. A very old Moor was the official slaughter-man, and he
sat in the shade of a wall, a bloody knife in hand, and conversed gravely
with villagers of his own age.
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