E. M. Forster

“ The noise was made no longer by merchants—who seldom so far remount the sources of their wealth—but by a certain amount of wooden machinery and by a great many Arabs. Some of them were fighting with masses of the stuff which was poured over them from an endless staircase. Just as they mastered it, more would arrive and completely bury them. They would shout with laughter and struggle, and then more cotton would come and more, quivering from the impetus of its transit, so that one could not tell which was vegetable, which man. ”

“ What is that dreadful noise! Run, run! Has somebody been killed?"
"Do not distress yourself, kind-hearted sir. It is only the merchants of Alexandria, buying cotton."
"But they are murdering one another surely." ”

“ Very good the coffee was, too, and the very blue sky and the keen air and the bright dresses of some natives raised for a moment the illusion that this courtyard was actually the academic East, and that caravans of camels were waiting with their snowy bales outside. There were other courtyards with ramifications of passages and offices, where the same mixture of light business and light refreshments seemed in progress—architectural backwaters such as one used to come across in the Earl's Court Exhibition, where commerce and pleasure met in a slack communion. ”