"
The guide led them through Dupont Street, the street of the bazaars, and
another smaller, less noisy street, where fat, long-gowned men, and women
with gold clasps in their glittering edifices of ebony hair, chaffered for
dried abalones, green sugarcane, and Chinese nuts. In basements they could
see through half-open doors at the bottom of ladderlike steps,
earnest-faced men, with long, well-tended queues of hair, busily tonsuring
sleepy clients. Stooping merchants, with wrinkled brown masks like the
soft shells of those nuts which others sold, could be discerned in dim,
tiny offices, poring through huge round spectacles as they wrote with
paint brushes, in volumes apparently made of brown paper. Here and there,
in a badly lit shop with a greenish glass window, an old chemist with the
air of a wizard was measuring out for a blue-coated customer an ounce of
dried lizard flesh, some powdered shark's eggs, or slivered horns of
mountain deer. These things would cure chills and fever; many other
diseases, too, and best of all, win love denied, or frighten away bad
spirits.
By and by they turned out of the street into a dim passage. This led into
another, and so on, until Angela lost count. But at last, when she began
to think they must be threading a maze, they plunged into a little square
court, where a lantern over one dark doorway showed faintly the blacks of
irregularly built houses.
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