Over there is a seller of vegetables who has dodged his police dues, apparently because his ready cash is insufficient. A gendarme approaches, whereupon he picks up his basket, with the wooden box on which it rests, and fades into the crowd. When the policeman has gone he reappears and resumes business. Twice more must he shut up shop, for a quarter of an hour at a time. Finally his takings allow him to pay the bribe. His wife guards the stall while he confers with the policeman round the corner. He reappears, and, no longer obliged to shun overmuch attention cries his wares loudly and does a roaring trade.
The candy-barrows are mostly kept by small boys comically dignified in apron and fez. Useless to think that their youth makes them easy game, for they are sharp as pawnbrokers, and can tell in the fraction of a second a bad note or coin. Most of them seem to have a working arrangement with some gendarme whereby if an adult tries to swindle they shriek invectives. The gendarme then strolls toward the stall, and the would-be cheat wishes he hadn't.
One or two seedy ruffians hang around the rim of the crowd, awaiting the chance of some petty villainy. Presently, out of the crush comes a little Syrian girl, carrying a bowl of milk. A much-moustached, dirty-robed Arab follows her into the entrance of a narrow street where he suddenly grabs the milk, drinks it, pushes the bowl back into her hands, and strides away. The little girl attracts a certain amount of attention by shrilling her protests; but the wolfish milk-drinker has vanished. A gendarme spectator makes no pretence at interference, not having been bribed to protect stray children.
Soon afterward a similar outrage is perpetrated by a similar ruffian, who snatches a chunk of meat from an old woman's basin of stew. In this case retribution comes swiftly and suitably. The Man who Grabs Meat has failed to notice that the weak old woman is attended by a strong young man, who has lagged behind to talk to a friend. The strong young man leaps at the thief, kicks him in the stomach—hard, knocks him down when he doubles up helplessly, and proceeds to beat him. The old woman shrieks her venom. The gendarme is much amused.
Through the changing crowd pass the drink-sellers, clanging a brass cup against a brass can, but neither washing nor rinsing the cup after somebody has drunk from it. From time to time a stall-keeper slips away for a glass of árak in the near-by café, while a wife or a friend guards his barrow.
Between eleven o'clock and midnight most of the traders run out of stock. They pack up their kit, and before leaving bargain with each other for an exchange of surplus foodstuffs for personal use—two loaves for a dish of vegetables, a can of milk for three slices of meat. The streets empty, the cries cease, the gendarmes disappear with their baksheesh; and we retire to join the little things that hop and crawl in our bed.
Always there was something to distract us. A Mohammedan official of the Indian Postal Service, for example, provided much interest. With only a fez differentiating his uniform from that of most native officers of the Indian Army, we accepted him at first as a fellow-prisoner. But when, at table, he asked leading questions about the Palestine operations, H. winked at me and fingered his lips as a signal. We took the hint, and answered vaguely.
"Don't like the look of the little blighter," said H., after dinner; "let's watch him."
He was worth watching. Every day, we found, he walked about the streets of Aleppo without a guard. Moreover, he was living by himself in a comfortable room. While this exceptional treatment of a prisoner did not prove treachery, the circumstantial evidence was fairly damning. We became as unopened clams when he talked to us.
This was the right attitude, for later, when at a concentration camp, we heard of an Indian official who was an out-and-out traitor. Sometimes he was at full liberty in Constantinople, sometimes he talked in railway trains to newly captured prisoners, sometimes he talked with them in hospitals. Once, at a hospital at Mosul, he was placed next to a wounded officer taken in a recent battle. His assumed complaint was influenza. Yet he was given full diet, and his temperature remained normal, while he lay in bed and asked questions about the Mesopotamian campaign.