The Story Teller of the Desert—"Backsheesh!" / or, Life and Adventures in the Orient

by Thomas Wallace Knox

You can buy the stuff anywhere from one to twenty dollars an ounce; the price you pay is only limited by your willingness to pay it, and the amount of money that your guide and the merchants (who are invariably “in cahoots”) think they can squeeze out of you. You can just as well buy for five dollars an ounce as for twenty; the genuine article, unadulterated in any way, is worth fifty dollars an ounce at the place of manufacture, and as the Orient demands large profits, you should expect to pay a hundred dollars for it in Constantinople.

You can set it down as a certainty that no stranger can possibly buy the genuine ottar of rose in the bazaars of Constantinople or Cairo.

Near these perfume bazaars are the shops where you can buy-all sorts of Oriental luxuries in the shape of shawls and silks, sandal and rosewood, Persian mirrors framed in fine paintings, articles of ivory, or ebony, or pearl, little odds and ends of filagree work; in fact, an endless variety of things of more or less value.

The merchants are not so ready to show their goods as those we have just passed, for the reason that the articles may be damaged by much handling, and customers are not very easy to obtain. If you show a disposition to trade, they will accommodate you; but they do not rush to strip their shelves at your approach.

We did not want to buy drugs, and so we went rather hastily through this bazaar to visit the “Grand Bazaar,” as it is generally known among foreigners as well as natives. Do not imagine that it is a single house; it is so in one sense, and in another is far from it. It is a sort of city within a city; it has streets, lanes, alleys, and squares, which are all roofed over, so that you might walk upon the housetops from one side of the bazaar to the other. Light is admitted through holes in the street roofs, some of them open and others covered with glass.

There is not light enough to go around and give a good supply to everybody, and sometimes you have to strain your eyes to see distinctly, and then you don’t. A good many of the shop-keepers in America are up to the same dodge; if you don’t believe it, just enter a ready-made clothing store in New York or Boston, and observe in what part of the establishment they endeavor to fit you.

Further on you find the shops where the silks of Broussa are sold, an article for which Constantinople has long been famous.

There are two kinds of Broussa goods, one entirely of silk and the other half silk and half linen; the latter is much the cheaper of the two, and greatly in demand for dresses after the European model. The merchants endeavor to tempt the masculine visitor with dressing-gown and wrappers of Broussa silks, and then with slippers and other articles which would make a sensation at home. There is a great supply of ready-made clothing of the Turkish pattern, especially for children; and you could rig out a small boy there in a very short time with garments that fit him exactly, from slippers up to head dress.

And so you go on. You can wander for hours in the bazaars, days will not exhaust their treasures, and I think I should be content to spend my odd moments there for at least half a year. The whole wealth of Ormus and of Ind seems to be stored there; and the eyes are frequently dazzled by some object of great value, whose existence is almost an enigma, and its uses still more so. You pass from the centre of one trade to that of another; now you are among the rows of shops where are sold the curiously-shaped shoes of the Orient. Thousands and thousands of shoes are exposed there, and you think if all Turkey should become by some miracle barefoot to-morrow morning, it could be newly shod before nightfall from this bazaar alone.

You enter the bazaar of the workers in gold and silver, and there you see enough of the precious metal to pay the national debt of any reasonably economical country, or at all events, to go far in that direction. You enter the bazaar of precious stones and see the light flashing and sparkling from thousands of diamonds of “purest ray serene,” and should you show a desire to purchase, they will bring forth from dusty and iron-bound coffers tens and hundreds of thousands of other diamonds, larger and more brilliant than those which hang or lie in the showcases. Collars, ear-drops, rings, and pins of diamonds and other precious stones are on exhibition, and many of them, in spite of their oriental mounting in semi-barbaric taste, are of great beauty.