One of our party admired a pair of ear-drops, and asked the price.
“Twenty francs,” was the reply.
Buyer declined to be a buyer at that figure, but ventured to offer five francs. The merchant put the jewelry into his box and shook his head. Then our party prepared to leave, and the merchant fell to fifteen francs. Buyer rose to six francs, and after a great deal of haggling, they met at seven francs and a half. In another instance, a trade was made at ten francs for something for which thirty francs had been demanded, and frequently half, or more than half the first price, was taken off to make a trade. An Oriental merchant expects you to bargain for his goods, and is quite surprised if you accept his offer at starting; and if you do it, you can be certain that you have deceived, yourself.
In many of the shops the makers of jewelry were at work; of course we were interested in seeing them. The man sat or squatted on the floor, in front of a small anvil; behind him was a little furnace, with a charcoal fire, which was kept alive by a bellows, worked by a boy or by the foot of the man. The bellows was in keeping with the rest of the equipment of the place—sometimes it was a bag of goatskin, and sometimes it had the shape, and was about the size of a Chinese lantern. The tools consisted of hammers and pinchers, and the men showed great dexterity in working them. Gold and silver are made to take curious shapes in the hands of these fabricants, and some of their performances appeared akin to magic. They had little turning lathes in some of the shops, and occasionally a man would hold with his toe the article which he was endeavoring to put into shape the size of a small egg; there is no saucer, but in its place there is a little socket of the general shape of a flower vase, and into this the cup fits very neatly. They must wear out, or become lost, at a remarkably rapid rate to judge by the quantities that were offered for sale.
The jewelry bazaar has many windings, and, somewhat to our surprise, we came out after many crooks and-turns by a passage-way, only a few feet from where we had entered.
Brass pans and pots for cooking purposes are in demand, and so are plates, on which to serve up sweetmeats. In some of the Not far away from the jewelers is the bazaar of the tinsmiths and workers in brass. Their shops are small, like all shops in the Orient, and their furnaces were much on the same style as those of the workers in gold and silver.
They were hammering brass and tin into a variety of shapes, the most common article being the pots for making coffee, and the little stands that hold the cups. They bring coffee to you in the Orient in a cup about shops they tried to sell us some very ancient plates of Saracenic manufacture, and the rapidity with which they reduced their figures, led me to suspect that the articles were skilful imitations, rather than genuine. The brass and tin bazaars are quite extensive, and the trade in these articles is evidently large.