Well, I mustn't fill this whole letter with nonsense about the time I
get up in the morning. There is so much to write about that I don't know
where to begin. I do wish you could see this place, Lulie. I wish you
could be here now looking out of my room window at the crowds in the
street. I could fill a half dozen pages telling you about the clothes
the people wear, although I must say that I have seen some whose clothes
could be all told about in one sentence, and not a very long sentence
at that. But you see all kinds of clothes, uniforms, and everyday things
such as we wear, and robes and fezzes and turbans and I don't know what.
You know what a fez is, of course. It's shaped like a brown-bread tin
and they wear it little end up with a tassel hanging down. And turbans!
To me, when I used to see pictures of people wearing turbans, they were
just pictures, that's all. It didn't seem as if any one actually tied up
the top of their head in a white sheet and went parading around looking
like a stick with a snowball stuck on the end of it. But they do, and
most of them look as dignified as can be, in spite of the snowball. And
I have seen camels, quantities of them, and donkeys, and, oh, yes, about
a million dogs, not one of them worth anything and perfectly contented
to be that way. And dirt! Oh, Lulie, I didn't believe there was as much
dirt in all creation as there is in just one of the back streets over
here. Galusha asked me the other day if I didn't wish I could go into
one of the houses and see how the people lived; he meant the poor
people. I told him no, not if he ever expected me to get anywhere else.
If the inside of one of those houses was like the outside, I was sure
and certain that I should send for a case of soap and a hundred barrels
of hot water and stay there scrubbing the rest of my life. And, oh, yes,
I have seen the Pyramids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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