Vergil in Averno: book Two of the Vergil Magus Series
“— laws intended largely to protect the trade and commerce, not all the city as such, as of the magnates in particular, whereas these streets (so-called), these lean lanes and mean alleyways and passages: into these would no great magnate venture. Much danger, little reason. The only legitimate trade carried on seemed to be that in the dung-locks shorn from around the scuts of sheep, a trade considerably less lucrative than that in goat’s-beards from Spicy Araby; now and then from some dusty doorway came evidence that anyway one heap of filth-clots was deemed dry enough to be beaten under some pliant substance with cudgels, to loose the dung from the locks, or partly so — else the process of washing such “wool” would be even more tedious. And more costly. Perhaps the rain, slow and sullen, had driven this trade indoors. Nasty as it was — some sight quickly glimpsed of thralls with heads wrapped up in cloth beating and thrashing piles from which arose a thick dust — the trade was legitimate.
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