It smelled like the Street of the Tanners, which is never good. Camel skins, ass skins, the skins of Persian lambs and of wild animals from the north were all on display, beautifully tanned as only our Baghdad tanners know how to work. Hung from ropes around the tanners’ stalls, they made a fresh and brave display in the little breeze that had sprung up from the Bosk of the Dates. But, unfortunately, before a tanner can hand a skin up for display, he must prepare it. And so, at the back of each stall were the tanning vats, where the skins of all the animals of the world lay soaking in solutions that rotted the hair away and softened the leather, and also rotted the inner surface of my nostrils away, and softened my brain. Karim must indeed be a man of the people to have chosen the Street of the Tanners to live in. Going behind a display of Indian zebu hides, I materialized as a beggar lad, a young fakir.
