and there were eggs in plenty, fetching from twopence to threepence the dozen, a high price for Morocco, and brought about by the export trade that has developed so rapidly in the last few years.  For the most part the traders seemed to be Berbers or of evident Berber extraction, being darker and smaller than the Arabs, and in some cases wearing the dark woollen outer garment, with its distinctive orange-coloured mark on the back.  Women and little children took no small part in the market, but were perhaps most concerned with the sale of the chickens that they brought from their homes, tied by the legs in bundles without regard to the suffering entailed.  The women did rather more than a fair share of porters’ work too.  Very few camels were to be seen, but I noticed one group of half a dozen being carefully fed on a cloth, because, like all their supercilious breed, they were too dainty to eat from the ground.  They gurgled quite angrily over the question of precedence.  A little way from the tents in which hardware was exposed for sale, bread was being baked in covered pans over a charcoal fire fanned by bellows, while at the bottom of the hill a butcher had put up the rough tripod of wooden poles, from which meat is suspended.  The slaughter of sheep was proceeding briskly.  A very old Moor was the official slaughter-man, and he sat in the shade of a wall, a bloody knife in hand, and conversed gravely with villagers of his own age.  When the butcher’s assistants had brought up three or four fresh sheep and stretched them on the ground, the old man would rise to his feet with considerable effort, cut the throats that were waiting for him very cleanly and expeditiously, and return to his place in the shade, while another assistant spread clean earth over the reeking ground.  Some of the sheep after being dressed were barbecued.

I saw many women and girls bent under the weight of baskets of charcoal, or firewood, or loads of hay, and some late arrivals coming in heavily burdened in this fashion were accompanied by their husband, who rode at ease on a donkey and abused them roundly because they did not go quickly enough.  Mules and donkeys, with fore and hind leg hobbled, were left in one corner of the market-place, to make up in rest what they lacked in food.  Needless to say that the marketing was very brisk, but I noted with some interest that very little money changed hands.  Barter was more common than sale, partly because the Government had degraded its own currency until the natives were fighting shy of it, and partly because the owners of the sheep and goats were a company of true Bedouins from the extreme South.  These Bedouins were the most interesting visitors to the Tuesday market, and I was delighted when one of them recognised Salam as a friend.  The two had met in the days when an adventurous Scot set up in business at Cape Juby in the extreme South, where I believe his Majesty Lebaudy the First is now king.