The most characteristic feature of the bazaar is its smell—that peculiar, inescapable blending of licorice and annis and pungent spices and heavy perfumes, combined with a vague odor of age and staleness which pervades the dust-laden air, and sometimes with an odor not at all vague which arises from the filth of unswept streets. It is not when I “hear the East a-callin’” but when I smell the East that the waves of homesickness sweep deepest over me. I love the scent of the bazaar. Sometimes I catch a whiff of it through the open door of a little basement store in the Syrian Quarter of New York; and in a moment my thoughts are five thousand miles away among the old familiar scenes.
The next most vivid impression of the bazaar is its weird combination of bright coloring and gloom. The narrow, winding street is guarded from the glaring sun by striped awnings and old carpets which reach across from house to house. Some few of the chief thoroughfares, like the “Street called Straight,” are enclosed by great cylindrical roofs of corrugated iron. You are indoors and yet out-of-doors. The light is dim; but it is daylight, and you feel that all the while the sun is shining very brightly overhead. Along the fronts of the shops and hanging on ropes which stretch across the street, are shining brasses and pieces of inlaid woodwork and cloths of the most gorgeous orient hues; but the rear of these same shops is usually wrapped in impenetrable gloom. Sometimes there is visible only a square black hole surrounded by a frame of gaudy silks. When you pass a blacksmith’s forge, with shadowy figures moving among the sparks at the back of the inky darkness, it seems like a glimpse into inferno.
Most of the shops are tiny affairs only six or eight feet square, which open on the street for their entire width and have the floor raised to about the height of the customer’s waist. The resemblance of a bazaar to a long double row of pigeon-holes is increased by the manner in which the box-like recesses follow continuously one after the other, with no doorways between, as the entrance to their upper stories is by ladders in the rear.
In the middle of his diminutive emporium, the typical Damascus merchant sits all day cross-legged, smoking his water-pipe, reading from a Koran placed before him on a little wooden book-rest, and eternally fondling his beard. Frequently he says his prayers. Sometimes he varies the monotony of a dull day by chatting with a fellow-merchant in a neighboring shop fully ten feet away. The Jews and Christians of the city may be annoyingly importunate; but the Moslems, who form the large majority, seem insolently careless as to whether the passing stranger pauses to examine their goods or not. Over their places of business they hang gilded invocations to “the One who giveth sustenance,” and then leave matters entirely in His hands. If nothing is sold all day, it is the will of Allah: if a customer does come, it is the will of Allah—that he shall be overcharged as much as possible.
Shopping in Damascus is not an operation to be hurried through with careless levity. If you appear a promising customer, the merchant will set coffee before you and, while you and he are drinking together, will talk about anything under the sun except business. When you ask him the price of an article, he may tell you to keep it for nothing, just as did Ephron the Hittite when Abraham was bargaining for the Cave of Machpelah.[29]
If, however, you offer a fair amount for that same “gift,” he will protest that to accept such a paltry sum would necessitate his children’s going hungry and naked. So he names a price about double what he expects to get, and you suggest a sum equal to half what you are willing to pay. Then follow vociferous exclamations, indignant gesticulations, and sacred oaths, while his price slowly comes down and yours slowly goes up, until at last they almost, though not quite, meet. Neither will change his “last word” by a single piaster. Negotiations are at an end. You turn scornfully to leave the shop of the extortioner, while the merchant commends his business to God and resignedly begins to wrap up the goods and return them to their shelves. He does this very deliberately, however, and just then—because you two are such good friends, whose appreciation of noble character finds its ideal each in the other’s life—you decide to split the difference, the purchase is completed, and you part with mutual protestations that only a deep, fraternal regard forces you—and him—to conclude the bargain at such a ruinous figure.
“It is bad, it is bad, saith the buyer;
But when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”[30]
Perhaps the shop-keeper will still, however, detain you for a glass of sherbet. If he does, then you have probably paid too much, after all.
A friend of mine was obliged to spend no less than two weeks in purchasing a single Persian rug; but during those two weeks the price went down ninety dollars. One winter I had occasion to buy, at different times, several small picture frames. They were all exactly the same size, shape and material, were obtained from the same salesman at the same shop, and in the end I paid for them the same price to a piaster. Yet the purchase of each one necessitated a half-hour of excited bargaining.