MARKET DONKEYS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 17 March 1925, Page 7

MARKET DONKEYS.

JN THE EAST AND WEST. IRELAND AND PALESTINE. The first morning in KiHarney, to our immense delight, broke fine and dear. It was, indeed, a day for gods and men. Everything was clean arid dear and beautiful. The air was exhilarating, and, though it had a touch of winter shrewdness in it, there was a spring-like feel about it, too, that made it good to be alive (writes S. E. Napier iu a travel article contributed to the Sydney Morning Herald). We had nothing to do in the morning but inspect the town and the inhabitants thereof. This turned out to be a fortunate thing for us. For it happened to be market day and never, 1 think, have we enjoyed marketing so much. Not that we were purchasers to any great extent. A few views and postcards and a couple of blackthorns at one of the.shops completed our business transactions; but the liveliness and novelty of the scenes in the market-place gave

is one of the most enlivening mornings we had ever spent.

The. main ingredients of a Killarney

marketing are donkeys and shawled women. And, lest I be accused of placing these two items in very unchivalrous order, let me hasten to add that I do so simply because the donkeys seemed to outnumber the ladies by at least two to one. Never were there so many jacks and jennets gathered together in one small spot, I should think; and the antics, of them, and the stubborness of them, and- the brayings and cavortings of them, made us laugh

till we were ill. They don’t call them donkeys in Ireland, by the way. They call them “asses” —and the word is generally prefixed with an adjective or two more illuminatingly descriptive than polite. Well, it was a case of “asses, asses, all the way,” that day. As we watched, round the corner of the street, leading into the' market-place, there came .what appeared to be at first glance, a moving haystack. It drew abreast, and we discovered that it was really a small cart, completely bidden by its load and that under the protecting'hay there marched the propulsive powei—the tiniest and daintiest little jennet you could imagine. Except by stooping almost to the ground one could see nothing of her but her hoofs; but there she was —the dearest little ass in the world —jogging along with her huge mountain of hay as if it were a rubber-tyred sulky. And tiny as she was, she was accompanied by something tinier. There, right under the car, running like a little dog at his mother’s heels, was her Liliputian colt, all ears and legs. He looked like a working model on a much reduced scale; L- could have picked him up and put him in my haversack with ease —or with a little squeezing, anyway, if I must be exact. Not a trace of any driver, nor, indeed, of any human accessory to the whole turnout, either before or after, could we see as it came by; but after it had passed, there, behold, were two shawled, bare-legged, and giggling coleens, seated on the tailboard,' half buried in the bay, and facing, as they needs must do, the road which they had come. Whether they or some invisible parties were driving the cart; and how they steered it, or gave orders to the jennet out of sight and hearing fo'r’ard, were mysteries we were unable to solve. But there they were, and there was the little ass; and presently we saw the cart, apparently of its own volition, slew round and back itself into its own appointed place within the market square. Multiply this incident by hundreds; spice it with laughter, and shouts, and

swearwords, and chafferings, and chaffings, and add a base of ass-brayings and dog barkings, and you have the nearest picture I can draw y6ii of the market-place at Killarney. THE JERUSALEM MARKET. .

By the time we had finished breakfast in the hotel the space between the Jaffa Gate and David Street was generally filled with market people. There is the powerful, upstanding Arab in liis flowing robe, a garb unaffected by the changes of fashion that have occurred since the days of Abraham. He has driven -in some goats and sheep, and these are being bartered. As horse and mechanically-propelled vehicles cannot enter narrow streets

of Old Jerusalem, the merchandise for the bazaar is lifted here from waggons

or the backs of camels and carried to its destination. . . Here, in Jerusa-

lem’s open-air market, it is the /women who are turning the parapet which skirts the moat in front of David’s Tower into a long vegetable stall. They come in from miles round with

great baskets of produce poised on their heads, and their* graceful figures and supple carriage are the envy of European women.

While 1 was in Jerusalem,only three locally-grown commodities appeared to be in season—eggs, • cauliflower, and firewood. .Oranges reached us by camel

from Jaffa, and potatoes from',. . well, they frequently tasted like a rain

soaked sack smells. These sturdy peasants are rarely veiled, and would sit through the morning by their gorging baskets of cauliflower in groups quite as picturesque as those of the flowersellers on the steps of the pizza di Spagna in Rome. If you had any illusion of the passive Oriental which had withstood the shock Alexandria or Cairo, it would be dispelled by the frequency that highpitched voices rose above the hum of the battering throng. Sometimes it is the shrill cries of boys steering droves of donkeys by word of mouth; at others a cfib-driver talking to a client Vim has paid him the correct charge, or a colleague who has beaten him' in a sprint to the hotel to pick up a fare; but, in a general way, the attitude of the disputant seems to bear out an impression which I have formed after many years of travel—that the farther you can go eastward the more explosive is the form of argument. ... - Every now and then the mellow tinkle of bells reaches the balcony. You can close your eyes and fancy you are listening to cow-bells on the Swiss mountains. A moment later a string of camels is seen on the Bethlehem l oad beyond the Jaffa Gate. Generally they continue their journey. If they are laden for the Jerusalem market they come inside and discharge their cargoes. They flop down on their knees, nose-bags are produced and spread out on the roadway, and the animals snarl at each other throughout the meal as if envious of every mouthful of food that goes into a rivkl stomach. By the middle of the morning there is something of everything in the crowd. The Moslem women, closely veiled* have appeared on the scene to do their marketing. Some are veiled in white, some in black, and some have coloured patterns painted on gauze, which they wear almost skin-tight over their faces. The women of Bethlehem mixed in the crowd. They are Christians, and are conspicuous by their head, dress, which resembles a Welsh woman’s top hat, with a, white veil thrown over it which comes down below the shoulders, but does not hide the features. — Ernest Smith, in the Fields of Adventure.