Page:The Plutocrat (1927).pdf/551

 trampling and clanging of iron-shod hooves. "Look! You are going to see him."

They leaned upon the railing and looked down upon a many-coloured jostle of turbans, bare heads, tasselled fezzes, pith helmets, and the ragged head swathings of mendicants. These were all busily clustering about a semicircular cleared space where stood an open red touring car almost intolerable to the eye in its splendour of mirroring brass; and drawn up, facing this equipage, were a troop of cavalrymen in violent uniforms, brown men with flamboyant mustachios and long curved sabres as amazing. Their harness clanked and jangled with the nodding of the restless Arabian chargers; the fantastic crowd pressed about them, murmuring; child beggars squealed and wept;—then, at a signal invisible to the observers on the veranda, one of the troopers blew a trumpet, and a little dark old gentleman, dapper in European dress, but with a fez upon his head, came out from the hotel. And with him came the resplendent Tinker, overshadowing everything with his broad shoulders and tall hat.

He passed through a group of reverent and gorgeous merchants, the sellers of jewels, of perfumes, of amber, of ivory, of silks, of velvet brocades, of em-