Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/50

32 its densest you step out into a little square in which the blaze of colour and the play of movement reach their height. You are in the carpet bazaar of Cairo—the spot at which the many-coloured throng around you finds its most gorgeous background. Carpets of every hue and web—Tunisian, Algerian, Smyrniote, Persian—drape the whole quadrangle with an arras worthy of a Sultan's seraglio. To think in "cold blood," and out of sight of it, of such a picture in such a frame would be to conjure up a vision of crude and garish magnificence at which the eye would ache and the taste revolt. But the East is an artist of unerring though unstudied skill, and every patch of brilliant and violently contrasted colour that it seems to have flung so recklessly together has fallen as by a divinely pre-established harmony into its proper and most effective place. And Nature herself, in compounding the pigments for these swarthy skins, has entered into a decorative conspiracy with man.