Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/225

 Bible" he had been given when he was a little boy.

Pleased, he went on, climbing up and down stone steps, penetrating dark thoroughfares so narrow that they were but passageways, and presently found that he was away from the Jews and among a different people. Most of these were as squalid and soiled as the mere deep holes they seemed to live in among the thick-walled buildings. And here the streets appeared to be brown tunnels, with intervals of meagre light where the vault was broken; and upon each side of him were mysterious and ponderous old green doors, or open low black archways where foul-robed brown men sat in the dirt with massed dates, or a few dusty vegetables, or perhaps a dozen copper or brass pans for sale beside them. Some of these streets were silent and almost empty and some were swarming and clamorous. Piteous tiny donkeys and lean goats were everywhere; and once Ogle was pressed to the wall by the passing of an enormously fat gray-bearded Arab almost wider himself than the street he rode in. For he was mounted, so to speak;—a donkey, almost hidden under the man's burnous and not larger than a collie, incredibly bore him over the uneven stones that were