We left him to finish his circuit, and walked on in search of the Circassian beauties of the market. Several turbaned slave-merchants were sitting round a manghal, or brass vessel of coals, smoking or making their coffee, in one of the porticoes, and my friend addressed one of them with an inquiry on the subject. “There were Circassians in the bazaar,” he said, “but there was an express firman, prohibiting the exposing or selling of them to Franks, under heavy penalties.” We tried to bribe him. It was of no use. He pointed to the apartment in which they were, and, as it was upon the ground floor, I took advice of modest assurance, and approaching the window, sheltered my eyes with my hand, and looked in. A great fat girl, with a pair of saucer-like black eyes, and cheeks as red and round as a cabbage-rose, sat facing the window, devouring a pie most voraciously. She had a small carpet spread beneath her, and sat on one of her heels, with a row of fat, red toes, whose nails were tinged with henna, just protruding on the other side from the folds of her ample trousers. The light was so dim that I could not see the features of the others, of whom there were six or seven in groups in the corners. And so faded the bright colours of a certain boyish dream of Circassian beauty! A fat girl eating a pie!
As we were about leaving the bazaar, the door of a small apartment near the gate opened, and disclosed the common cheerless interior of a chamber in a khan. In the centre burned the almost extinguished embers of a Turkish manghal, and, at the moment of my passing, a figure rose from a prostrate position, and exposed, as a shawl dropped from her face in rising, the exquisitely small features and bright olive skin of an Arab girl. Her hair was black as night, and the bright braid of it across her forehead seemed but another shade of the warm dark eye that lifted its heavy and sleepy lids, and looked out of the accidentally-opened door as if she were trying to remember how she had dropped out of “Araby the blest” upon so cheerless a spot. She was very beautiful. I should have taken her for a child, from her diminutive size, but for a certain fulness in the limbs and a womanly ripeness in the bust and features. The same dusky lips which give the males of her race a look of ghastliness, either by contrast with a row of dazzlingly white teeth, or from their round and perfect chiselling, seemed in her almost a beauty, I had looked at her several minutes before she chose to consider it as impertinence. At last she slowly raised her little symmetrical figure (the “Barbary shape” the old poets talk of), and slipping forward to reach the latch, I observed that she was chained by one of her ankles to a ring in the floor. To think that only a “malignant and turbaned Turk” may possess such a Hebe! Beautiful creature! Your lot,
“By some o’er-hasty angel was misplaced,
In Fate’s eternal volume.”
And yet it is very possible she would eat pies, too!
We left the slave-market, and wishing to buy a piece of Brusa silk for a dressing-gown, my friend conducted me to a secluded khan in the neighbourhood of the far-famed “burnt column.” Entering by a very mean door, closed within by a curtain, we stood on fine Indian mats in a large room, piled to the ceiling with silks enveloped in the soft satin-paper of the East. Here again coffee must be handed round before a single fold of the old Armenian’s wares could see the light, and fortunate it is, since one may not courteously refuse it, that Turkish coffee is very delicious, and served in acorn cups for size. A handsome boy took away the little filagree holders at last, and the old trader, setting his huge calpack firmly on his shaven head, began to reach down his costly wares. I had never seen such an array. The floor was soon like a shivered rainbow, almost paining the eye with the brilliancy and variety of beautiful fabrics. And all this to tempt the taste of a poor description-monger, who wanted but a plain robe de chambre to conceal from a chance visitor the poverty of an unmade toilet! There were stuffs of gold for a queen’s wardrobe; there were gauze-like fabrics interwoven with flowers of silver; and there was no leaf in botany, nor device in antiquity, that was not imitated in their rich borderings. I laid my hand on a plain pattern of blue and silver, and half-shutting my eyes to imagine how I should look in it, resolved upon the degree of depletion which my purse could bear, and inquired the price. As “green door and brass knocker” says of his charges in the farce, it was “ridiculously trifling.” It is a cheap country, the East! A beautiful Circassian slave for a hundred dollars (if you are a Turk), and an emperor’s dressing-gown for three! The Armenian laid his hand on his breast, as if he had made a good sale of it, the coffee-bearer wanted but a sous, and that was charity; and thus, by a mere change of place, that which were but a gingerbread expenditure becomes a rich man’s purchase.
LETTER XXXIV.
The Bosphorus—Turkish Palaces—The Black Sea—Buyukdere.