I make fun of poor Aurora, who after all had perhaps divined in poor Michael, at the flood of her tide, what she was really after. But I found it rather quaint, I must confess, that he, the reaper and binder of Zerbetta, Ohio, should be caught by Stambul. Yet why not? I myself am unaccountably moved by reapers and binders, by motors and dynamos and steam engines, by all manner of human ingenuities of which I know nothing and could never learn anything. Why should not Michael have been moved by things as foreign to him? Moreover has there not always been in the Anglo-Saxon some uneasy little chord that has made him the wanderer and camper-out of the earth, that nothing can twitch like the East?
Michael took an astonishing fancy to that bumpy old place, and to those mangy dogs and those fantastic smells and those inconvenient costumes and those dusty Bazaars and all the trash that is in them. He bought quantities of it. Rugs and brasses and I don’t know what uncannily kept turning up long after he had dropped through his crack. Aurora received them tearfully as tributes to herself, and I believe they paved the way for her next experiment. Michael’s successor is an antiquary as well as an astrologer, and he keeps an occult junk-shop on a top floor in Union Square.
That junk, as it happened, was just what played so fateful a part in Michael’s adventure. He bought a good deal of it from a certain antiquity man who knew English better than any one else Michael ran across in the Bazaars. Finding Michael a promising customer, the antiquity man said he had better stuff stored away in a khan outside the Bazaars. And Michael, of course, was delighted to go and look at it. Do you wonder?
The khan was one of those old stone houses in Mahmud Pasha that have a Byzantine look about them, with their string-courses of flat bricks, the heavy stone brackets of their projecting upper storeys, the solid iron cages of their windows, and their arched tunnels leading into courts within courts, where grape-vines grow and rugs lie fading in the sun. The antiquity man took Michael up some stone stairs into one of the galleries overlooking a court, and then into a series of dirty little stone rooms full of all sorts of queer-looking boxes and bundles. And some of the boxes and bundles were opened with great ceremony, and Rhodian plates were brought forth for Michael to admire—Persian tiles, Byzantine enamels—You know the sort of thing.
Michael, our reaper and binder, liked it. I can’t say how intelligently he liked it; but he had discovered a new world, and he liked it well enough to go back again and again. I must confess that I don’t recollect very much about it, myself. I do remember, though, that the most outlandish-looking people—Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Persians, Tartars, Heaven knows who—carry on outlandish-looking activities there. Any number of forges and blow-pipes flare in those dark stone rooms, where goldsmiths and silversmiths make charms, amulets, reliquaries, little Virgins to hang around your neck, little votive hands and feet to hang on icons, silver rings for Turks who think it wicked to wear gold, and filigree chains, pendants, and lamps in the Byzantine tradition. That’s where most of the antiques sold in the Bazaars come from. And devilishly well-made a lot of them are, too. I know a Byzantine gold chalice in a museum in England, decorated with St. Georges of the tenth century, that came out of that khan not twenty years ago! Admirable coins and gems come from there too, to say nothing of Tanagra figurines. Did you ever hear of a Chalcedonian figurine? Not many other people have, either. But plenty of real ones used to be dug up on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus; and clever Greek potters copy them and rename them for tourists. However, it isn’t all fake. There are real artists in those dark little stone rooms. And there are real antiques—some of them stored away, some of them undergoing a final dilapidation to suit them for the critical eye of fake collectors.
Michael liked it all so much that he spent more time in that extraordinary maze than was good for his reapers and binders. The people got to know him by sight, and they let him rummage around by himself.
IV
He turned up one afternoon to look at some pottery, and the antiquity man happened to be out. Michael was therefore given coffee and left more or less to his own devices. Nobody could talk to him, you see, and the antiquity man was coming back.
Michael prowled mildly about, finding nothing much to look at but packing-cases and kerosene tins—those big rectangular ones that everybody in the Levant hoards like gold. He presently recognised, however, on top of a pile of boxes, a basket that he had seen at the antiquity man’s shop in the Bazaars—a basket, with an odd little red figure in the wicker, containing embroideries. He managed to get it down, and found it unexpectedly heavy. It turned out to be full this time of broken tiles. He poked them over. Each bit was worth something—for a flower on it, or an Arabic letter, or a glint of Persian lustre. But as he poked down through them, what should he come across but some funny-looking metal things: some round, some square, some with clockwork fastened to them. It suddenly occurred to him to wonder if bombs looked like that! He proceeded, very gingerly, to replace the bits of tile.
Just then he became aware that the antiquity man had come in quietly and was looking at him.