A fountain is sending its spray aloft till the green drooping branches of the bananas and those feathery tree-ferns are everywhere spangled with diamonds. I will rest here. I wish I could catch a few of those wondrous butterflies, or even one of those fairylike humming-birds—mere sparks of light and colour that flit and buzz from flower to flower. I wish I could—that I—I mean—I—wish—'
'Hullo! Murdoch. Where are you? Why, here he is at last, sound asleep under an orange-tree!'
It is my wild Highland brothers. They have both been shaking me by the shoulders. I sit up and rub my eyes. 84
'Do you know we've been looking for you for over an hour?'
'Ah, Dugald!' I reply, 'what is an hour, one wee hour, in a place like this?'
We must now go to visit the market-place, and then we are going to the hotel to dine and sleep.
The market is a wondrously mixed one, and as wondrously foreign and strange as it is possible to conceive. The gay dresses of the women—some of whom are as black as an ebony ball; their gaudy head-gear; their glittering but tinselled ornaments; their round laughing faces, in which shine rows of teeth as white perhaps as alabaster; the jaunty men folks; the world of birds and beasts, all on the best of terms with themselves, especially the former, arrayed in all the colours of the rainbow; the world of fruit, tempting in shape, in beauty, and in odour; the world of fish, some of them beautiful enough to have dwelt in the coral caves of fairyland beneath the glittering sea—some ugly, even hideous enough to be the creatures of a demon's dream, and some, again, so odd-looking or so grotesque as to make one smile or laugh outright;—the whole made up a picture that even now I have but to close my eyes to see again!
When night falls the streets get for a time more crowded; side-paths hardly exist—at all events, the inhabitants show their independence by crowding along the centre of the streets. Not much light to guide them, though, except where from open doors or windows the rays from lamps shoot out into the darkness.
Away to the hotel. A dinner in a delightfully cool, large room, a punkah waving overhead, brilliant lights, joy on all our faces, a dessert fit to set before a king. Now we shall know how those strange fruits taste, whose perfume hung around the market to-day. To bed at last in a room scented with orange-blossoms, and around the windows of which the sweet stephanotis clusters in beauty—to bed, to sleep, and dream of all we have done and seen.
We awaken—at least, I do—in the morning with a glad 85 sensation of anticipated pleasure. What is it? Oh yes, the picnic!