"What will you do with your palace when you leave it?" we ask, seeing that it could not be moved unless the whole were jumbled up in a sack, when it would be impossible to reconstruct it.
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"Oh, I'd let it to some one else."
"For how much?"
"Well, that I'd leave to God."
A glance round the interior of this strange abode shows that there are still many materials employed in its construction which might have been enumerated. One or two bundles, a box and a basket round the sides, serve to support the roof, and from the ridge-pole hangs a bundle which we are informed contains semolina. I once saw such a bundle suspended from a beam in a village mosque in which I had passed the night in the guise of a pious Muslim, and, observing its dusty condition, inquired how it came there.
"A traveller left it there about a year and a half ago, and has not yet come for it," was the reply; to judge from which it might remain till Doomsday—a fact which spoke well for the honesty of the country folk in that respect at least, although I learned that they were notorious highwaymen.
Though the roof admits daylight every few inches, the occupier remarks that it keeps the sun and rain off fairly well, and seems to think none the worse of it for its transparent faults. A sick woman lying in a native hut with a thatched roof hardly in better condition than this one, remarked when a visitor observed a big hole just above her pallet bed—
"Oh, it's so nice in the summer time; it lets the breeze in so delightfully!"