Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/54

36 audience assembled here would be fully as well qualified to appreciate it as its original witnesses. Nor is the medley of manners less striking than the hotch-potch of races and the tangle of tongues. The Oriental of popular Western conception is grave and dignified of aspect, tall of stature, stately of gait, slow of speech and movement, calm and impassive of temperament; and popular Western conception is not wrong. The Oriental is all these things—and their opposites. In one form of him he treads the roadway with the majesty of Haroun Alraschid; in another he scampers through the streets like a Parisian gamin. Here his utterance is as measured, his manual actions as restrained as those of an English judge pronouncing a capital sentence; there, just across the street, he is as full of jabber and gesture as a Neapolitan lazzarone. The features of that venerable merchant who has pipes to sell are as absolutely unemotional as a Red Indian's; but if the purchaser who is