But those two hours are beyond measure delightful. Some of us were querulous up to that time and doubted of the wisdom of making the voyage. Lisbon, we owned, was a failure. Athens a dead failure; Malta very well, but not worth the trouble and seasickness; in fact, Baden-Baden or Devonshire would be a better move than this; when Smyrna came and rebuked all mutinous Cockneys into silence. Some men may read this who are in want of a sensation. If they love the odd and picturesque, if they loved the "Arabian Nights" in their youth, let them book themselves on board one of the Peninsular and Oriental vessels and try one dip into Constantinople or Smyrna. Walk into the bazaar and the East is unveiled to you; how often and often have you tried to fancy this, lying out on a summer holiday at school! It is wonderful, too, how like it is; you may imagine that you have been in the place before, you seem to know it so well!
"The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome; there is no fatigue of sublimity about it. Schacabac and the little Barber play as great a part in it as the heroes; there are no uncomfortable sensations of terror; you may be familiar with the great Afreet, who was going to execute the travelers for killing his son with a date stone. Morgiana, when she kills the Forty Robbers with boiling oil, does not seem to hurt them in the least; and though King Schahrier makes a practice of cutting off his wives' heads, yet you fancy they got them on again in some of the back rooms of the palace, where they are dancing and playing on dulcimers. How fresh, easy, good-natured is all this! How delightful is that notion of the pleasant Eastern people about knowledge, where the height of science is made to consist in the answering of riddles and all the mathematicians and magicians bring their great beards to bear on a conundrum!
"When I got into the bazaar among this race, somehow I felt as if they were all friends. There sat the merchants in their little shops, quiet and solemn, but with friendly looks. There was no smoking, it was the Ramazan; no eating—the fish and meats fizzing in the enormous pots of the cook-shops are only for the Christians. The children abounded; the law is not so stringent upon them, and many wandering merchants were there selling figs (in the name of the Prophet, doubtless), for their benefit, and elbowing onward with baskets of grapes and cucumbers. Countrymen passed bristling over with arms, each with a huge bellyful of pistols and daggers in his girdle; fierce, but not the least dangerous. Wild swarthy Arabs, who had come in with the caravans, walked solemnly about, very different in look and demeanor from the sleek inhabitants of the town. Greeks and Jews squatted and smoked, their shops tended by sallow-faced boys, with large eyes, who smiled and welcomed you in; negroes bustled about in gaudy colors; and women, with black nose-bags and shuffling yellow slippers chattered and bargained at the doors of the little shops. There was the rope quarter and the sweetmeat quarter, and the pipe bazaar and the arm bazaar, and the little turned-up shoe quarter, and the shops where ready-made jackets and pelisses were swinging, and the region where, under the ragged awnings, regiments of tailors were at work. The sun peeps through these awnings of mat or canvas, which are hung over the narrow lanes of the bazaar and ornaments them with a thousand freaks of light and shadow. Cogia Hassan Alhabbal's shop is in a blaze of light; while his neighbor, the barber and coffee-house keeper, has his premises, his low seats and narghilés, his queer pots and basins, in the shade. The cobblers are always good-natured; there was one who, I am sure, has been revealed to me in my dreams, in a dirty old green turban, with a pleasant wrinkled face like an apple; twinkling his little gray eyes as he held them up to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful old gray beard, which did the heart good to see. You divine the conversation between him and the cucumber man, as the Sultan used to understand the language of birds. Are any of those cucumbers stuffed with pearls, and is that Armenian with the black square turban Haroun Alraschid in disguise, standing yonder by the fountain where the children are drinking—the gleaming marble fountain, checked all over with light and shadow, and engraved with delicate Arabesques and sentences from the Koran?
"But the greatest sensation of all is when the camels come. Whole strings of real camels, better even than in the procession of Blue Beard, with soft rolling eyes and bended necks, swaying from one side of the bazaar to the other to and fro, and treading gingerly with their great feet. Oh, you fairy dreams of boyhood! Oh, you sweet meditations of half-holidays, here you are realized for half an hour! The genius which presides over youth led up to do a good action that day. 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 voice of many little shouting voices, much more musical than that of Naso in the matted parlor, and the guide told us it was a school, so we went upstairs to look.
"I declare, an 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 toward 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 as long as he lives.
"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 flavor, and so large that Cinderella might almost be accommodated with a coach made of a big one, without any very great distention 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 figure than if they had been stuffed in holsters; 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 color. 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 Tehean.
"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 caravanseria, 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 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. Over this Roman arch, which crosses the Meles river, all the caravans pass on their entrance to the town. On one side, as we sat and looked at it, was a great row of plane trees; on the opposite bank a deep wood of tall cypresses, in the midst of which rose up innumerable gray tombs, surmounted with the turbans of the defunct believers. Beside the stream the view was less gloomy. There was under the plane trees a little coffee house, shaded by a trellis-work, covered over with a vine and ornamented with many rows of shining pots and water-pipes, for which there was no use at noonday now, in the time of Ramazan.