Settled down with a kind of gloomy relish to the customary bargaining

From The Great Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert. Page 41.

Trooper Charles Quevillart of the 7th Dragoon Guards, who had hitherto seen little of the world outside his native Norwich, was astonished by the size and bustle of the bazaar when he arrived at Karachi. There were not only Indians there but Arabs, Jews and Eurasians, sepoys and Englishmen, Chinese with pigtails and Parsees in white dresses and shining oilskin caps. They talked with a 'babel-like confusion of tongues', the speech of the Indians sounding like 'the rattling of pebbles in an iron pot'. Once Quevillart saw a naked black man, with a red handkerchief tied round his head and his body covered in grease, go berserk in the crowd, slashing to right and left with a tulwar until overcome and killed by an outraged mob. But usually the crowds in the narrow lanes and alleyways were perfectly good-natured and affable, as well as marvellously entertaining, presenting 'an astounding melange of Parsee merchants in monstrous chariots.with outriders, Arab horse dealers, native ladies and children fantastically bedizened in carriages drawn by oxen, buffaloes drawing hackeries, water-carriers yelling, coolies squabbling'. The shopkeepers made no display of their wares but sat cross-legged on mats outside their shops and stalls, casting up their accounts and fanning themselves with hand-punkahs. On being asked to sell something they invariably produced their worst stock first, asked three times its value and settled down with a kind of gloomy relish to the customary bargaining which was carried on to the accompaniment of loud shouts from the passers-by and the banging of tom-toms. Inside their shops, Quevillart complained, the flies were so numerous that it was 'utterly impossible to discern a particle' of what the shops contained, while the stench was intolerable. 'Every inhabitant makes a common sewer in front of his dwelling,' he noticed, 'and the narrow passes are blocked up with dung heaps in which recline pariah dogs . . . The houses are built of mud, wood and brick, simply mere hovels.'