137 
A VISIT TO THE BAZAAUS. 
men are bawling madly for passengers, the hamil are running 
to and fro with heavy burdens, shouting guar da ! as a matter 
of habit; crowds of bare-legged laborers are tugging at big 
timbers, and deafening one another with loud conversation; 
Greek sailors, piratical-looking Italians, Russian, French, and 
English men-of-war crews are lounging about the cafes , smok¬ 
ing, drinking, and quarreling; Turks and Arabs are bowing 
down to Mecca in the midst of the confusion; Jewish mer¬ 
chants are bartering their wares ; native peddlers are crying 
the merits of their glittering trinkets; bakers are shouting 
from their bread stands; hucksters from their tables of figs, 
cheese, and sausages ; fruiterers from out of baskets of grapes ; 
coffee-carriers running about madly with large tin urns, heat¬ 
ed by red-hot coals, shrieking the charms of muddy coffee ; 
grave Persians and pale Armenians gliding silently and with 
ghostly solemnity through the crowd—all touched, you would 
say, on some point—a little cracked about the affairs of life, 
just like the rest of us. 
At last, after getting lost a dozen times in the narrow 
streets, you enter a dark arched way, much as you would 
enter a cavern, with a lurking suspicion of an attack from a 
horde of banditti. This is the beginning of the famous bazaars 
of Stamboul. What a strange place it is, and how utterly im¬ 
possible to give any adequate description of it on paper ! All 
the pages that have ever been written on the subject fail to 
give a correct notion of these bazaars ; either too much is ex¬ 
pected or too little—any thing but the strange reality. A 
single glance at such a scene is worth all the pictures that 
pen or pencil has ever drawn; it dwells forever in the mem¬ 
ory, wdth the vividness of a first impression ; it is beyond the 
ornament of language or the glowing colors of art; it is fixed 
indelibly upon the brain, and rises unbidden before the eye 
throughout the future, in all its wondrous variety of lights, 
shadows, costumes, and glittering wares; in every thought 
of the glorious East it is the embodiment of the East itself. 
It must not be supposed, however, that there is any thing 
very magnificent about these bazaars—any thing to compete 
in splendor with the shops of the Palais Royal or the Arcades 
