"When" he says "Captain Argol's vessel hove in sight, the worthy burghers were seized with such a panic, that they fell to smoking their pipes with astonishing vehemence, insomuch that they quickly raised a cloud, which, combining with the surrounding woods and marshes, completely enveloped and concealed their beloved village; and overhung the fair regions of Pavonia:—so that the terrible Captain Argol passed on, totally unsuspicious that a sturdy little Dutch settlement lay snugly couched in the mud, under cover of all this pestilent vapor."
A Persian Water Pipe.
The Persians[52] are said to be the first to invent the mode of drawing tobacco smoke through water thereby cooling it before inhaling it. Fairholt says "it is to smoking what ice is to Champagne." The London Review gives the following description of pipes and smoking apparatus:
"The hookah of India is the most splendid and glittering of all pipes; it is a large affair, on account of the arrangements for causing the smoke to pass through water before it reaches the lips of the smoker, as a means of rendering it cooler and of extracting from it much of its rank and disagreeable flavor.
"On the top of an air-tight vessel, half filled with water, is a bowl containing tobacco; a small tube descends from the bowl into the water, and a flexible pipe, one end of which is between the lips of the smoker, is inserted at the other end into the vessel, above the level of the water. Such being the adjustment, the philosophy of the inhalation may be easily understood. The smoker sucks the air out of the vessel, and makes a partial vacuum; the external air, pressing on the burning tobacco, drives the smoke through the small tube into the water beneath; purified from some of its rank qualities, the smoke bubbles up into the vacant part of the vessel above the water, and passes through the flexible pipe to the smoker's mouth. Sometimes the affair is made still more luxurious by substituting rose-water for water pur et simple. The tube is so long and flexible that the smoker may sit (or squat) at a small or great distance from the vessel containing the water. In the courts of princes and wealthy natives the vessels and tubes are lavishly adorned with precious metals. One mode of showing hospitality in the East is to place a hookah in the center of the apartment, range the guests around, and let all have a whiff of the pipe in turn; but in more luxurious establishments a separate hookah is placed before each guest. Some of the Egyptians use a form of hookah called the narghile or nargeeleh—so named because the water is contained in the shell of a cocoanut of which the Arabic name is nargeeleh. Another kind, having a glass vessel, is called the sheshee—having, like the other, a very long tube. Only the choicest tobacco is used with the hookah and nargeeleh; it is grown in Persia.
"Before it is used, the tobacco is washed several times, and put damp into the pipe-bowl, two or three pieces of live charcoal are put on the top. The moisture gives mildness to the tobacco, but renders inhalation so difficult that weak lungs are unfitted to bear it. The dry tobacco preferred by the Persians does not involve so much difficulty in 'blowing a cloud.'"
TURKISH CHIBOUQUES AND WOOD PIPES.
"The stiff-stemmed Turkish pipes, quite different from the flexible tube of the hookah and narghile, are of two kinds, the kablioun or long pipe, and the chibouque or short pipe. Some of the stems of the kablioun, made of cherry tree, jasmine, wild plum, and ebony, are five feet in length, and are bored with a kind of gimlet. The workman, placing the gimlet above the long, slender branchlet of wood, bores half the length, and then reverses the position to operate upon the other half. The wild cherry tree wood, which is the most frequently employed, is seldom free from defects in the bark, and some skill is exercised in so repairing these defective places that the mending shall be invisible."