Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/247

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restaurant. But I saw no negroes in the Indian market, and no Indians in the negro restaurant. The Hindus were very quiet, serious and busy, but the negroes were very idle and noisy. The native or negro market made me think of a negro church festival. In the negro market we saw thirty native doctors. These men sold roots and herbs said to be good for various ailments; with every purchase, they gave medical advice free. The thirty doctors sat together, squatted on the floor in front of the roots and herbs they were offering, and seemed more intelligent than those around them. . . . In the Indian market, the thing that attracted my particular attention was that sheep heads were displayed at all the meat stalls, and every head was bloody and dirty, just as it came from the butcher's hands. Sheep feet, equally dirty, were also displayed. In India the traveler sees a great many shops devoted to the sale of cheap candy, cut in square, triangular and round pieces. All of it is highly colored; pink, green, blue, brown, etc., and seems to be of the nature of our "fudge." The same shops are seen in the Hindu section of Durban, as the Hindus are constantly eating sweets; this is their dissipation, instead of drinking intoxicants. Nearly everything I saw of unusual interest in India, I saw repeated in the Hindu quarter of Durban, but the Hindus here seem much more prosperous than the same class in India. . . . I speak of all the Indians in Durban as Hindus, but as a matter of fact many of them are Mohammedans; my waiter at the Marine Hotel is a Mohammedan, but my chamber-man is a Hindu. There is not much difference between them racially, but the Mohammedans