ide the camel with
ease and dignity; but an Englishman, Italian or American on a camel
looks and feels wholly out of place, and at the end of a day's journey
is an object of pity and a subject for soothing lotions.

The impression that John Cornwall formed of Tripoli was that it was a
vastly overcrowded city, due to a host of visiting and trading natives
and the more than ten thousand soldiers, at that time, quartered in the
city.

The blue Mediterranean, the white beach, the brilliancy of the sun, the
palm trees and the crescent city, in the main of cement or plaster
buildings, with flat or beehive roofs, all white except an occasional
red or green tiled one, merely emphasizing by contrast the uniformity of
the building color; make an interesting picture.

The varieties of nationality, costume and color are striking in the
extreme. Here are seen men and women, white, brown, yellow, black and
shades and combinations of two or all. Here are youthful forms, graceful
and like living bits of ebony or bronze; antiques weatherworn and
wind-dried, who when asleep upon the sidewalk, which is quite the
custom, look like recently disentombed mummies; old and wrinkled women
with hair dyed a brilliant red; Italian soldiers in the national green
uniform; native or colonial troops in khaki; some native regiments and
police in vivid blue or brown with red fez topped with a huge yellow
tassel; beggars and children with little more than a breech cloth; women
with faces covered and breasts and limbs uncovered; women wrapped as
ghosts, with just the feet showing and one eye peeping and twinkling,
encircled about the middle with many folds of cloth; the medicine or
dance man in his costume of rags, crane heads and feathers, with a
girdle of jangling tin and bones, his little drum with curved sticks,
his dance and music the convulsions and noises of a stupid beggar; and
many, very many, blind;--who seem to have no home but the sidewalk,
where you see them asleep at any time, day or night, waiting in darkness
for alms and the judgment day.

A certain sect shave the head and grow a crown lock, Chinaman style,
except it is unplatted. The blessed dead must not be denied by the hands
of the living, so the lock is left to handle the corpse.

The chief business is fighting. The chief export, a desert grass used in
the manufacture of a fine paper. Business is stagnant, as the war
between the Italians and the Arabs shifted barter by caravan wit