and there, wrapped in old rags, is much grey muddy snow melting and
freezing itself. It has been brought on rickety lorries down the rutty
tracks of the mountains, down, down into the lowland of Batum, where
even October suns are hot.
Near the snow stalls behold veiled Turkish women just showing their
noses out of bright rags, and tending the baking of chestnuts and
maize cobs, sausages, pies, fish, and chickens. Here for eightpence
one may buy a hot roast chicken in half a sheet of exercise-paper. The
purchasers of hot chicken are many, and they take them away to open
tables, where stand huge bottles of red wine and tubs of tomato-sauce.
The fowl is pulled to bits limb by limb, and the customer dips, before
each bite, his bone in the common sauce-bowl.
Those who are poorer buy hot maize cobs and cabbage pies; those who
feel hot already themselves are fain to go to the ice and lemonade
stall, and spend odd farthings there. I bought myself _matsoni_,
Metchnikof's sour milk and sugar, at a halfpenny a mug.
The market square is vast. It is wonderful the number of scenes
enacting themselves at the same time. All the morning in another
quarter men were trying on old hats and overcoats, and having the most
amazing haggling over articles which are sold in London streets for a
pot of ferns or a china butter-dish. In another part popular pictures
are spread out, oleographs showing the Garden of Eden, or the terror
of the Flood, or the Last Judgment, and such like; in another is a
wilderness of home-made bamboo furniture, a speciality of Batum. And
for all no lack of customers.
What a place of mystery is a Russian Fair, be it in the capital or at
the outposts of the Empire! There is nothing that may not be found
there. One never knows what extraordinary or wonderful thing one may
light upon there. Among old rusty fire-irons one finds an ancient
sword offered as a poker; among the litter of holy and secular
secondhand books, hand-painted missals of the earliest Russian times.
Nothing is ever thrown away; even rusty nails find their way to the
_bazar_. The miscellanies of a stall might upon occasion be what is
left behind after a house removal. On one table at Batum I observed
two moth-eaten rusty fezes, a battered but unopened tin of herrings in
tomato-sauce, another tin half-emptied, a guitar with one string, a
good hammer, a door-mat worn to holes, the clearing of a book-case, an
old saucepan, an old kerosene stove, a broken coffee-grinder, and a
rusty spring mattress. Under the stall were two Persian greyhounds,
also for sale. The shopmen ask outrageous prices, but do not expect to
be paid them.
"How much the kerosinka?" I asked in sport.
"Ten shillings," said an old, sorrowful-looking Persian.
I laughed sarcastically, and was about to move away. The Persian was
taking the oil-stove to bits to show me its inward perfection.
"Name your price," said he.
I did not want a kerosene stove, but for fun I tried him on a low
figure--
"Sixpence," I said.
"Whew!" The Persian looked about him dreamily. Did he sleep, did he
dream?
"You don't buy a machine for sixpence," said he. "I bought this
second-hand for eight-and-sixpence. I can offer it to you for nine
shillings as a favour."
"Oh no, sixpence; not a farthing more."