Having said our prayers, my guide and I, we left the Harem and returned to the bazaars. The smell of burning aloe-wood drew our eyes to a shop where combs seemed to be the only purchasable articles. These combs, made of ebony, were of two kinds. The first, used by the men, are called male combs. They are provided with a single row of teeth. The others, known as female combs, have teeth on both sides. We passed on. A man bearing a sheepskin was hawking honey, like the water of the eye for purity. It is brought down to the Meccan markets by the Arabs of the clan of Beni Salem, another branch of the tribe of Harb, who also dwell not far from Rabegh, and are more numerous than the two tribes aforementioned, whose Sheykhs we had the pleasure of meeting in the coffee-house. Among the countless hawkers thronging the thoroughfares not a single Arab milkman did we see. We met only one milkman, and he was an Indian. For milk-selling is not a popular pursuit in Arabia. Indeed, it carries with it the stigma of an ineffaceable disgrace, the term “milk-seller” having come to bear the meaning of “bastard.” In like manner the Persians make use of the expression “mást-kash,” sour milk carrier, on the rare occasions when they are driven to reprove a mean flatterer. The first shop we entered was that of a draper who drove a remunerative trade in winding-sheets. There we noticed the poorer side of the East. Crowds of beggars--not necessarily poverty-stricken--were practising their lucrative business. Some were weeping, many were malingering, and one was really dead. There was no bargaining over the prices of the grave-clothes. Every purchaser chose the one he could afford to buy. While I was selecting mine Seyyid ’Alí intervened, saying, in an undertone: “Yá-Moulai, allow me to persuade you to buy the oldest you can find, to the end that Nakír and Munkar, when you come to die (God forbid), may pass you by as having already answered their cross-examination as to your spiritual preparedness. For my own part, being in sound health--praise be to God on high!--I have no faith whatever in the existence of those Inquisitors. I am of the opinion of the Persian grandee who, having stuffed the mouth of his dead groom with grain, and having opened the grave in due course, found the grain still in the groom’s mouth, and cried: ‘This is proof positive that he never answered Munkar and Nakír, and strong presumptive evidence that no such Inquisitors exist!’ Nay, grow not impatient with me. Am I not the least of thy slaves?”