There Was A Man Sitting In An Open Room,
Ornamented With Fine Long-Tailed Sentences Of The Koran:
Some in
red, some in blue; some written diagonally over the paper; some so
shaped as to represent ships, dragons, or mysterious animals.
The
man squatted on a carpet in the middle of this room, with folded
arms, waggling his head to and fro, swaying about, and singing
through his nose choice phrases from the sacred work. But from the
room above came a clear noise of many little shouting voices, much
more musical than that of Naso in the matted parlour, and the guide
told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to look.
I declare, on my conscience, the master was in the act of
bastinadoing a little mulatto boy; his feet were in a bar, and the
brute was laying on with a cane; so we witnessed the howling of the
poor boy, and the confusion of the brute who was administering the
correction. The other children were made to shout, I believe, to
drown the noise of their little comrade's howling; but the
punishment was instantly discontinued as our hats came up over the
stair-trap, and the boy cast loose, and the bamboo huddled into a
corner, and the schoolmaster stood before us abashed. All the
small scholars in red caps, and the little girls in gaudy
handkerchiefs, turned their big wondering dark eyes towards us; and
the caning was over for THAT time, let us trust. I don't envy some
schoolmasters in a future state. I pity that poor little
blubbering Mahometan: he will never be able to relish the "Arabian
Nights" in the original, all his life long.
From this scene we rushed off somewhat discomposed to make a
breakfast off red mullets and grapes, melons, pomegranates, and
Smyrna wine, at a dirty little comfortable inn, to which we were
recommended: and from the windows of which we had a fine cheerful
view of the gulf and its busy craft, and the loungers and merchants
along the shore. There were camels unloading at one wharf, and
piles of melons much bigger than the Gibraltar cannon-balls at
another. It was the fig-season, and we passed through several
alleys encumbered with long rows of fig-dressers, children and
women for the most part, who were packing the fruit diligently into
drums, dipping them in salt-water first, and spreading them neatly
over with leaves; while the figs and leaves are drying, large white
worms crawl out of them, and swarm over the decks of the ships
which carry them to Europe and to England, where small children eat
them with pleasure - I mean the figs, not the worms - and where they
are still served at wine-parties at the Universities. When fresh
they are not better than elsewhere; but the melons are of admirable
flavour, and so large, that Cinderella might almost be accommodated
with a coach made of a big one, without any very great distension
of its original proportions.
Our guide, an accomplished swindler, demanded two dollars as the
fee for entering the mosque, which others of our party subsequently
saw for sixpence, so we did not care to examine that place of
worship. But there were other cheaper sights, which were to the
full as picturesque, for which there was no call to pay money, or,
indeed, for a day, scarcely to move at all. I doubt whether a man
who would smoke his pipe on a bazaar counter all day, and let the
city flow by him, would not be almost as well employed as the most
active curiosity-hunter.
To be sure he would not see the women. Those in the bazaar were
shabby people for the most part, whose black masks nobody would
feel a curiosity to remove. You could see no more of their figures
than if they had been stuffed in bolsters; and even their feet were
brought to a general splay uniformity by the double yellow slippers
which the wives of true believers wear. But it is in the Greek and
Armenian quarters, and among those poor Christians who were pulling
figs, that you see the beauties; and a man of a generous
disposition may lose his heart half-a-dozen times a day in Smyrna.
There was the pretty maid at work at a tambour-frame in an open
porch, with an old duenna spinning by her side, and a goat tied up
to the railings of the little court-garden; there was the nymph who
came down the stair with the pitcher on her head, and gazed with
great calm eyes, as large and stately as Juno's; there was the
gentle mother, bending over a queer cradle, in which lay a small
crying bundle of infancy. All these three charmers were seen in a
single street in the Armenian quarter, where the house-doors are
all open, and the women of the families sit under the arches in the
court. There was the fig-girl, beautiful beyond all others, with
an immense coil of deep black hair twisted round a head of which
Raphael was worthy to draw the outline and Titian to paint the
colour. I wonder the Sultan has not swept her off, or that the
Persian merchants, who come with silks and sweetmeats, have not
kidnapped her for the Shah of Tehran.
We went to see the Persian merchants at their khan, and purchased
some silks there from a swarthy black-bearded man, with a conical
cap of lambswool. Is it not hard to think that silks bought of a
man in a lambswool cap, in a caravanserai, brought hither on the
backs of camels, should have been manufactured after all at Lyons?
Others of our party bought carpets, for which the town is famous;
and there was one who absolutely laid in a stock of real Smyrna
figs; and purchased three or four real Smyrna sponges for his
carriage; so strong was his passion for the genuine article.
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