Occasionally, as we near the centre of the town, we come across open squares with a small mosque on the one side. The wall of the mosque is dirty white, and there is a little black lettering over the doorway, but very little tile or brick. In the middle there may be a dilapidated octagon with a flat top, about five feet high and six across, built of mud covered with tiles rather the worse for wear. Round such squares there are generally arched recesses, filled in at the bottom, so as to make a ledge three feet from the ground. The bazaars are just the old narrow lanes, covered by a succession of mud domes forming a continuous but untidy roof. The goods are displayed on tiers of mud ledges, and there is a mud room behind. Quantities of the wares are mud. Firepans, barrels for grain, several kinds of toys, bread receptacles, and some other household implements are simply clay, moulded into a rough form, and dried in the sun. Water-bottles, various kinds of pitchers, children’s money-boxes, and hookah-bowls are baked with fire, but without the slightest glaze. The baker’s ovens are made of mud, down to the very doors. Many of the Yezdis even eat mud, and develop an unwholesome muddy complexion. The cleverness of the Yezdi in manipulating mud is beyond belief. Sometimes you may see men in the streets making barrels for storing grain. First of all a smooth round slab of mud about an inch and a half thick, is moulded on the ground. Then another piece of mud is kneaded into a long sausage, and placed in a hoop upon the edge of the slab. Sausage after sausage is added hoopwise, one on the top of the other, until a height of about four feet has been reached. Each hoop, as it is laid in position, is worked with the hand into smooth connection with the hoop below, and when the barrel is completed there is not the least vestige of a join. The whole is done without wheel or machinery of any kind. A mud lid is added which is soldered on with mud when the barrel is filled. I have hardly yet succeeded in giving any adequate impression of the untidiness of the streets. The central courtyard of the house is generally a fair-sized garden. For reasons connected with the water supply the inhabitants of the houses are continually altering the level of these places, and large quantities of earth are emptied into the street or carried out of it every day as occasion may arise. All along the sides of the streets there are shallow holes for rubbish heaps; here and there there are cesspools; and yet with all this the streets are so well scavenged by dogs and children that, except in the Jewish quarter, the thoroughfare is comparatively clean, while, thanks to the powerful sun and the absolute absence of moisture in the atmosphere, almost the only obtrusive smells from one end of the town to the other are those that hang round the public baths and the places used by the dyers.