I Saw
Hassan, The Fisherman, Getting His Nets; And Ali Baba Going Off
With His Donkey To The Great Forest For Wood.
Smith looked at
these wonders quite unmoved; and I was surprised at his apathy; but
he had been at Smyrna before.
A man only sees the miracle once;
though you yearn over it ever so, it won't come again. I saw
nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we came to Smyrna, and
had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the inn) about landing
at all. A person who wishes to understand France or the East
should come in a yacht to Calais or Smyrna, land for two hours, and
never afterwards go back again.
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 sea-sickness: 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. Shacabac 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 travellers 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 Schahriar makes a practice of cutting off
his wives' heads, yet you fancy they have 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 meat 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 onwards
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 demeanour 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 colours; 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 awning, 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 neighbour, the barber and coffee-house
keeper, has his premises, his low seats and narghiles, 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 grey eyes as he held them
up to talk to the gossips, and smiling under a delightful old grey
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, chequered 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. O you fairy dreams of boyhood! O you sweet
meditations of half-holidays, here you are realised for half-an-
hour! The genius which presides over youth led us to do a good
action that day.
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