So, with the fascination of the city for excuse, I lingered in Marrakesh and went daily to the bazaars to make small purchases. The dealers were patient, friendly folk, and found no trouble too much, so that there was prospect of a sale at the end of it. Most of them had a collapsible set of values for their wares, but the dealer who had the best share of my Moorish or Spanish dollars was an old man in the bazaar of the brass-workers, who used to say proudly, "Behold in me thy servant, Abd el Kerim,[43] the man of one price."
The brass and copper workers had most of their metal brought to them from the Sus country, and sold their goods by weight. Woe to the dealer discovered with false scales. The gunsmiths, who seemed to do quite a big trade in flint-lock guns, worked with their feet as well as their hands, their dexterity being almost Japanese. Nearly every master had an apprentice or two, and if there are idle apprentices in the southern capital of my Lord Abd-el-Aziz, I was not fated to see one.
No phase of the city's life lacked fascination, nor was the interest abated when life and death moved side by side. A Moorish funeral wound slowly along the road in the path of a morning's ride. First came a crowd of ragged fellows on foot singing the praises of Allah, who gives one life to his servants here and an eternity of bliss in Paradise at the end of their day's work. The body of the deceased followed, wrapped in a knotted shroud and partially covered with what looked like a coloured shawl, but was, I think, the flag from a saint's shrine. Four bearers carried the open bier, and following came men of high class on mules. The contrast between the living and the dead was accentuated by the freshness of the day, the life that thronged the streets, the absence of a coffin, the weird, sonorous chaunting of the mourners. The deceased must have been a man of mark, for the crowd preceding the bier was composed largely of beggars, on their way to the cemetery, where a gift of food would be distributed. Following their master's remains came two slaves, newly manumitted, their certificates of freedom borne aloft in cleft sticks to testify before all men to the generosity of the loudly lamented. Doubtless the shroud of the dead had been sprinkled with water brought from the well Zem Zem, which is by the mosque of Mecca, and is said to have been miraculously provided for Hagar, when Ishmael, then a little boy, was like to die of thirst in the wilderness.