The Sultan’s Perfumer—Etiquette of Smoking—Temptations for
Purchasers—Exquisite Flavour of the Turkish Perfumes—The Slave
Market of Constantinople—Slaves from various Countries, Greek,
Circassian, Egyptian, Persian—African female Slaves—An
Improvisatrice—Exposure for Sale—Circassian Beauties
prohibited to Europeans—First sight of one, eating a Pie—Shock
to romantic Feelings—Beautiful Arab Girl chained to the
Floor—The Silk Merchant—A cheap Purchase.
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 Bozestein. 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 grey beard just sprinkled a pair of blown-up
cheeks, and a collapsed double chin that fell in curtain folds to his
bosom, a moustache, 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 humour 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 attar 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 gentlemanlike 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 towards me, rubbed the
moistened cork over my nascent moustache, and waited with a satisfied
certainty for my expression of admiration as it “ascended me into the
brain.” There was no denying it was of celestial flavour. 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 attar of roses stood next on the shelf. It was the best ever sent
from Adrianople. Bottle after bottle of different extracts were passed
under nasal review; each, one might think, the triumph of the alchemy 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 Haidee’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 taskmaster for their best
hope of relief.
A shout of African laughter drew us to the other side of the bazaar. 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 bazaar. 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 bazaar, 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
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.
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