The hour of the sunset prayer is approaching.  The wealthier members of the community leave many attractive bargains unpursued, and, heedless of the dilals’ frenzied cries, set out for the Sok el Abeed.  Wool market in the morning and afternoon, it becomes the slave market on three days of the week, in the two hours that precede the setting of the sun and the closing of the city gates; this is the rule that holds in Red Marrakesh.

I follow the business leaders through a very labyrinth of narrow, unpaved streets, roofed here and there with frayed and tattered palmetto-leaves that offer some protection, albeit a scanty one, against the blazing sun.  At one of the corners where the beggars congregate and call for alms in the name of Mulai Abd el Kader Ijjilalli, I catch a glimpse of the great Kutubia tower, with pigeons circling round its glittering dome, and then the maze of streets, shutting out the view, claims me again.  The path is by way of shops containing every sort of merchandise known to Moors, and of stalls of fruit and vegetables, grateful “as water-grass to herds in the June days.”  Past a turning in the crowded thoroughfare, where many Southern tribesmen are assembled, and heavily-laden camels compel pedestrians to go warily, the gate of the slave market looms portentous.

A crowd of penniless idlers, to whom admittance is denied, clamours outside the heavy door, while the city urchins fight for the privilege of holding the mules of wealthy Moors, who are arriving in large numbers in response to the report that the household of a great wazeer, recently disgraced, will be offered for sale.  One sees portly men of the city wearing the blue cloth selhams that bespeak wealth, country Moors who boast less costly garments, but ride mules of easy pace and heavy price, and one or two high officials of the Dar el Makhzan.  All classes of the wealthy are arriving rapidly, for the sale will open in a quarter of an hour.

The portals passed, unchallenged, the market stands revealed—­an open space of bare, dry ground, hemmed round with tapia walls, dust-coloured, crumbling, ruinous.  Something like an arcade stretches across the centre of the ground from one side to the other of the market.  Roofless now and broken down, as is the outer wall itself, and the sheds, like cattle pens, that are built all round, it was doubtless an imposing structure in days of old.  Behind the outer walls the town rises on every side.  I see mules and donkeys feeding, apparently on the ramparts, but really in a fandak overlooking the market.  The minaret of a mosque rises nobly beside the mules’ feeding-ground, and beyond there is the white tomb of a saint, with swaying palm trees round it.  Doubtless this zowia gives the Sok el Abeed a sanctity that no procedure within its walls can besmirch; and, to be sure, the laws of the saint’s religion are not so much outraged here as in the daily life of many places more sanctified by popular opinion.