University of Virginia Library

94. LETTER XCIV.

An Abyssinian slave, with bracelets on his wrists
and ankles, a white turban, folded in the most approved
fashion around his curly head, and a showy silk
sash about his waist, addressed us in broken English
as we passed a small shop on the way to the Bezestein.
His master was an old acquaintance of my polyglot
friend, and, passing in at a side door, we entered a
dimly-lighted apartment in the rear, and were received,
with a profusion of salaams, by the sultan's perfumer.
For a Turk, Mustapha Effendi was the most
voluble gentleman in his discourse that I had yet met
in Stamboul. A sparse gray beard just sprinkled a
pair of blown-up cheeks, and a collapsed double chin
that fell in curtain folds to his bosom, a mustache, of
seven or eight hairs on a side, curled demurely about
the corners of his mouth, his heavy, oily black eyes
twinkled in their pursy recesses, with the salacious good
humor of a satyr; and, as he coiled his legs under
him on the broad ottoman in the corner, his boneless
body completely lapped over them, knees and all, and
left him, apparently, bolt upright on his trunk, like a
man amputated at the hips. A string of beads in one
hand, and a splendid narghilé, or rose-water pipe in
the other, completed as fine a picture of a mere animal
as I remember to have met in my travels.

My learned friend pursued the conversation in Turkish,
and, in a few minutes, the black entered, with
pipes of exquisite amber filled with the mild Persian
tobacco. Leaving his slippers at the door, he dropped
upon his knee, and placed two small brass dishes
in the centre of the room to receive the hot pipe-bowls,
and, with a showy flourish of his long, naked
arm, brought round the rich mouth-pieces to our
lips. A spicy atom of some aromatic composition,
laid in the centre of the bowl, removed from the
smoke all that could offend the most delicate organs,
and, as I looked about the perfumer's retired sanctum,
and my eye rested on the small heaps of spice-woods,
the gilded pastilles, the curious bottles of ottar of roses
and jasmine, and thence to the broad, soft divans
extending quite around the room, piled in the corners
with cushions of down, I thought Mustapha, the perfumer,
among those who lived by traffic, had the
cleanliest and most gentleman-like vocation.

Observing that I smoked but little, Mustapha gave
an order to his familiar, who soon appeared, with two
small gilded saucers; one containing a jelly of incomparable
delicacy and whiteness, and the other a candied
liquid, tinctured with quince and cinnamon. My
friend explained to me that I was to eat both, and that
Mustapha said, “on his head be the injury it would
do me.” There needed little persuasion. The cook
to a court of fairies might have mingled sweets less
delicately.

For all this courtesy Mustapha finds his offset in
the opened hearts of his customers, when the pipes
are smoked out, and there is nothing to delay the offer
of his costly wares. First calling for a jar of jessamine,
than which the sultan himself perfumes his
beard with no rarer, he turned it upside down, and,
leaning toward me, rubbed the moistened cork over
my nascent mustache, and waited with a satisfied certainty
for my expression of admiration as it “ascended
me into the brain.” There was no denying that it
was of a celestial flavor. He held up his fingers:
“One? two? three? ten? How many bottles shall
your slave fill for you?” It was a most lucid pantomime.
An interpreter would have been superfluous.

The ottar of roses stood next on the shelf. It was
the best ever sent from Adrianople. Bottle after bottle
of different extracts was passed under nasal review;
each, one might think, the triumph of the alchymy
of flowers, and of each a specimen was laid aside for
me in a slender vial, dexterously capped with vellum,
and tied with a silken thread by the adroit Abyssinian.
I escaped emptying my purse by a single worthless
coin, the fee I required for my return boat over the
Golden Horn—but I had seen Mustapha, the perfumer.

My friend led the way through several intricate
windings, and passing through a gateway, we entered
a circular area, surrounded with a single building divided
into small apartments, faced with open porches.
It was the slave-market of Constantinople. My first
idea was to look round for Don Juan and Johnson.
In their place we found slaves of almost every eastern
nation, who looked at us with an “I wish to heaven
that somebody would buy us” sort of an expression,
but none so handsome as Haidce's lover. In a low
cellar, beneath one of the apartments, lay twenty or
thirty white men chained together by the legs, and
with scarce the covering required by decency. A
small-featured Arab stood at the door, wrapped in a
purple-hooded cloak, and Mr. H. addressing him in
Arabic, inquired their nations. He was not their
master, but the stout fellow in the corner, he said, was
a Greek by his regular features, and the boy chained
to him was a Circassian by his rosy cheek and curly
hair, and the black-lipped villain with the scar over his
forehead, was an Egyptian, doubtless, and the two that
looked like brothers, were Georgians or Persians, or
perhaps Bulgarians. Poor devils! they lay on the
clay floor with a cold easterly wind blowing in upon
them, dispirited and chilled, with the prospect of being
sold to a task-master for their best hope of relief.

A shout of African laughter drew us to the other
side of the bazar. A dozen Nubian-damsels, flat-nosed
and curly-headed, but as straight and fine-limbed
as pieces of black statuary, lay around on a platform
in front of their apartment, while one sat upright in
the middle, and amused her companions by some narration
accompanied by grimaces irresistibly ludicrous.
Each had a somewhat scant blanket, black with dirt,
and worn as carelessly as a lady carries her shawl.
Their black, polished frames were disposed about, in
postures a painter would scarce call ungraceful, and
no start or change of attitude when we approached betrayed
the innate coyness of the sex. After watching
the improvisatrice awhile, we were about passing on,
when a man came out from the inner apartment, and
beckoning to one of them to follow him, walked into
the middle of the bazar. She was a tall, arrow-straight
lass of about eighteen, with the form of a
nymph, and the head of a baboon. He commenced
by crying in a voice that must have been educated in
the gallery of a minaret, setting forth the qualities of
the animal at his back, who was to be sold at public
auction forthwith. As he closed his harangue he
slipped his pipe back into his mouth, and lifting the
scrimped blanket of the ebon Venus, turned her twice
round, and walked to the other side of the bazar,
where his cry and the exposure of the submissive
wench were repeated.

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 bazar,” 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 colors of a certain
boyish dream of Circassian beauty! A fat girl eating
a pie!

As we were about leaving the bazar, 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 a turbaned Turk”
may possess such a Hebe! Beautiful creature!
Your lot,

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 neighborhood 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 visiter 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.