The spice stall under canvas

An original literary non-fiction-style account of walking past a spice stall as a market opens.

Before the cloth covers came off, the stall was a line of small anonymous hills. The seller folded the canvas back section by section. Red appeared, then a dusty yellow, then a brown so deep that the little scoop resting on it looked pale. The colours did not resemble the bright packets in my kitchen cupboard. They seemed heavier, as though each had arrived with its own temperature.

The seller levelled one heap with the back of his scoop. A thin slide of powder ran down the side and stopped without reaching the cloth below. He replaced a label, shifted a jar and stepped back. The stall had the careful disorder of a landscape maintained by hand.

A gust moved through the aisle. The canvas roof lifted, held its breath and fell. Smells reached me before I could decide which heap they belonged to. One was warm and dry; another caught sharply at the back of my nose. A woman beside me named three things she wanted. The seller's hands answered faster than his voice, moving from bag to scale to the folded top of each packet.

When she left, he returned to the first heap and repaired the place where the scoop had entered it. The market around him was still assembling itself: poles knocking together, a radio searching for a station, empty crates dragged across the paving. On his table, the red hill stood complete again, carrying a small neat hollow just behind the label.

How does the writer use language to present the stall's sensory richness and the seller's care?