sandal-wood rosaries such as are used by
dervish and monk; he then, in despair, routs
out wooden Persian pen-cases, painted with
stag-hunts, and combats, and amorous scenes
from the poets, straw-plaited cigar-cases, gilt
pastille-burners, and rose-water sprinklers; but
I shoulder away all, and buy only some jasmine
pipe-stalks, some gold tissue for slippers, and
some sequin bracelets: Zenope all the time looking
deeply depressed at the low prices he
pretends I exact and grind from him. If he smile,
he smiles ruefully and with an effort, but I
suppose when I am well out of the door he makes
up for it. At all events, he will revenge his
wrongs on Rocket, who is planning the
purchase of an Oriental dressing-gown—for I don't
know how many hundred piastres—besides a
prayer-carpet of great value, and an ivory chest
of Indian work. I observe that everything costs
Zenope the Armenian more than he sells it for,
and yet that whatever you talk of buying
outside—mouthpieces, slippers, fez, or turban—he
seems to wish to be the scapegoat of, and to buy
for you.

I tear myself from Zenope: two Jew touts
fighting about their claims to me just outside
his shop: and turn down a cross street to the
right and enter the jewellers' bazaar, which
shuts at three or four o'clock. The stalls in
this quarter differ from those in the other
villages of this great Tyre and Sidon under cover.
They are not small banked up platforms, with a
dog-kennel door behind and shelves all round for
goods, but they are small bins, looking like
cumbrous pews, or heavy timber sofas, or four-post
bedsteads cut down into enclosures. One would
think that the Jews who watch you from them
expected a rush of turbaned men some day at
the diamonds hidden away inside, in chests and
trebly-locked drawers. Not that there is much
visible: nothing but a few upright glass-cases such
as country dealers keep lollypops in, of coarse
cornelian signet rings, and turquoise earrings,
and little talisman triangular gold plates, and a
few ill-set brilliants. Though emeralds are the
fashion just at present with those rather
whimsical beauties the Turkish ladies, I saw
none on show except two or three that looked
like fragments of chemists' bottles. The
emerald, with the essence of eternal spring in its
heart—rubies, with undying fire at their cores
—opals, with the dawn breaking their mist,
yet never piercing quite through—were here, I
knew, somewhere, up those sly fellows' loose
jugglers' sleeves, or in the centre of those carved
cut down bedsteads, but see them I could not.
Indeed, the attention of the Shylock merchants
seemed entirely taken up by some itinerant,
ragged-robed peripatetics, who, holding high over
their heads amber mouthpieces filleted with
"sparklers," as the English cracksman affectionately
calls diamonds, or large, round, embossed
silver vessels like metal melons—used, I believe,
to contain sweetmeats, or trifle, or syllabub, or
Beelzebub knows what—kept pacing through
the rows of chattering cross-legged dealers
shouting some imaginary bidding as "Yetmish,"
"Elli," in screeching tones, most vociferous,
most intolerable. These stray dealers, whose
whole capital had, I suppose, been
expended in the saffron mouthpiece or the rough
silver melon, seldom obtained any attention,
except now and then a robed arm, right or left
from either side of the street they threaded,
snatched from them the melon or the mouthpiece,
and then pushed it back scornfully into the
violent talker's hand, at the same time repeating
a number very low down in the scale of numerals.

These brokers seem to itinerate the bazaars
all day long from prayer to prayer; now with a
belt full of pistols, now with an armful of
Persian books, now with a sheaf of chibouk
stalks, now flourishing a tinny-looking yataghan,
now waving a tobe, now making great play
with an ambery rhinoceros-hide target, bossed
with brass, from Abyssinia. I looked for some
time at a Turk at the entrance of the bazaar
winnowing a pile of seed pearl, and at another
shaking loose diamond sparks about in a drawer.
I looked at cameos, and at one little stray oval
of Wedgewood's, which the dealer evidently
mistook for some Greek work of alarming
value. I stayed for a moment to see an
engraver working a little lathe with a sort of
fiddlestick, while he gouged delicately at the
cornelian signet. Presently, before one of the
stalls, a Turkish lady, blooming with rouge, came
and sat down, and began to cheapen some silver
bracelets, upon which her black, motherly-
looking duenna frowned me away to the Arms
bazaar, where I was bound. Now, as only a
day before, Rocket and Windybank had heard a
shopkeeper in the bazaars threatened by soldiers
for selling to an infidel muslin handkerchiefs
with the "Mashallah" embroidered at the corners,
I thought I had better go when I saw the
shopkeeper's eye turned uncomfortably on me.

The Arms bazaar is dim and eastern, and
lighted by dark glass eyes high over head. The
first stall you come to, is perhaps a Persian's; he
sits moodily among a row of broad poniards and
Korans. He is reading. He shows you at your
request several daggers, some with handles of
agate or of a certain opaque green stone not
unlike marble. He brings out a little bit of
steel, like an English table-knife, on which he
sets fabulous value. He has broad double-edged
knives, tapering to a point and grooved down
the middle; others, with tinselled handles, worth
hundreds of piastres. You begin to get afraid that
the solemn man in the black retreating cap is a
cheat, all the worse for being plausible, when he
suddenly frowns, as if he had discovered that your
views of cheap and dear were unworthy of any
one but an infidel, and replaces all the daggers
against the wall, and goes on moodily reading.
I think he must be a dervish, for there are
dervishes in the bazaar, as well as dervish soldiers
and dervish sailors.

The next dealer is a bland man, all attention
and anxiety—Armenian, I think, for the
dealers of that nation are greater rogues than
even the Greeks. I buy for a sovereign, a
javelin head, needle-shaped at the point, inlaid