Shantytown cats

We walked from Dar Khalifa through the shantytown down a dusty earth road made uneven by protruding stones. On our left was the mosque and the mosque school, on our right a stall that sold vegetables. It was backed by a high wall and round it customers had gathered. A little farther on, at a place where a profusion of climbing plants spilled over the wall, an adolescent boy wearing a black T-shirt and black trousers which reached just below his knee, was selling white-skinned, earth-free potatoes from a cart over which a clean cloth had been laid. The donkey was nowhere to be seen.

We rounded a corner and found a row of simple dwellings. They were windowless, or had very small windows. The corrugated iron which formed their roofs was weighed down with bricks and on each door a lozenge pattern was painted, but beside plastic water tanks there were satellite dishes. The shantytown had only one standpipe to provide water, but mains electricity.

A large area of common ground separated the shantytown from the tarred road and high-walled villas opening on to it. On part of it short grass grew, elsewhere there were other plants which, from a distance, were impossible to identify. Here egrets had landed and hens, some with chicks at their feet, were pecking. A large flock of shorn long-tailed sheep lay close together.

Nearer the houses, where the ground was bare, leaning tree-branches propped up lines hung with clothes drying and bedding being aired. In the shade of rugs goats sheltered from the hot sun and a magnificent rooster stood proudly with red comb and wattles, a long scarf of silky russet feathers and black curving feathers at his tail. It was here we found cats sleeping in shadow.