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.
I wonder that no painter has given us familiar views of the East:
not processions, grand sultans, or magnificent landscapes; but
faithful transcripts of everyday Oriental life, such as each street
will supply to him. The camels afford endless motives, couched in
the market-places, lying by thousands in the camel-square, snorting
and bubbling after their manner, the sun blazing down on their
backs, their slaves and keepers lying behind them in the shade:
and the Caravan Bridge, above all, would afford a painter subjects
for a dozen of pictures.
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