Free Tower of Zanid by L. Sprague de Camp

The Zaniduma are a light-fingered lot. This’ll be almost the first time Gazi and I have been able to take our bath at the same time. If you’d like to take yours afterward…”
    “No thank you! Is running water in hotel.”
    Fallon, holding the family cake of soap in one hand, and towing Gazi with the other, wormed his way toward the nearest shower-head. The driver and his assistant had finished tightening the joints of their extensible pipe-system and now laid hold of the handles at the ends of the walking-beam that worked the pump. They tugged these handles up and down, grunting, and presently the shower-heads sneezed and began to spray water.
    The Zaniduma yelled as the cold fluid struck their greenish skins. They laughed and splashed each other; it was a festive occasion. The land of Zanid rose out of the treeless prairies of west-central Balhib, not many hundred hoda from where these gave way to the vast dry steppes of Jo’oPand Qaath. Water for the city had to be hauled up from deep wells, or from the muddy trickle of the shallow Eshqa. There was a water-main from the Eshqa above the city and a system of shaihan-powered pumps for raising the water, but this served only the royal palace, the Terran Hotel, and a few of the mansions in the Gabanj.
    Fallon and Gazi had gotten reasonably clean, and were picking their way out of the crowd, when Fallon stiffened at the sight of Fredro, on the edge of the square, with their two sufkira draped over one shoulder, focussing his camera for a shot of the crowd.
    “Oy!” said Fallon. “The damned fool doesn’t know about the soul-fraction belief!”
    He started toward the archeologist, pulling Gazi, when she pulled back, saying: “Look! Who’s that, Antane?”
    A voice resounded through the square. Turning, Fallon saw, over the heads of the Krishnans, that an Earthman in a black .suit and a white turban had climbed up on the wall around the base of the tomb of King Balade, to harangue the bathers:
    “…for this one God hates all forms of immodesty. Beware, sinful Balhibuma, lest ye mend not your iniquitous ways and He deliver you into the hands of the Qaathians and the Gozashtanduma. Dirt is a thousand times better than exposure to…”
    It was Welcome Wagner, the American Ecumenical Monotheist. Fallon observed that the heads of the Krishnans were turning, one by one, toward the source of this stentorian outcry.
    “…for in the Book, it says that no person shall expose his or her modesty before another. And furthermore…”
    “Is everybody trying to start a riot?” sighed Fallon. He turned back toward Fredro, who was aiming his camera at the backs of the crowd, and hurried over to the archeologist, barking: “Put that thing away, you idiot!”
    “What?” asked Fredro. “Put away camera? Why?”
    The crowd; still looking at Wagner, began to grumble. Wagner kept on in his piercing rasp:
    “Nor shall ye eat the flesh of those creatures ye call safqa, for it was revealed that the One God deems sin the eating of those Terran creatures called snails, clams, oysters, scallops, and other animals of the shellfish kind…”
    Fallon said to Fredro: “The Balhibuma believe that taking a picture of them steals a piece of their souls.”
    “But that cannot be the right I took—I took pictures at festival and nobody minded.”
    Some of the crowd had begun to answer, “We’ll eat as pleases us!” “Go back to the planet whence you came!”
    Fallon said tensely: “They had their clothes on! The tabu applies only when they’re stripped!”
    The crowd had become noisier, but Welcome Wagner merely yelled louder. The driver of the water-wagon and his-assistant, becoming absorbed in the scene, stopped pumping. When the water ceased to flow, those who had been standing around the wagon began straggling across the square to the denser crowd that was forming around the tomb.
    Fredro said: “Just one more picture, please.”
    Fallon impatiently grabbed for the camera.