Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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A half-day in the bazaars I would not exchange for a whole wilderness of Sphinxes. You may go twice and thrice before the Sphinx, but there comes a time when there is no place for you but the ebb and flow of the human tide in the narrow streets; when you spend all your leave there, and are content to commend the venerable dead and their mausolea to the Keeper of Personality for ever.

I dare not enter on the multiplicity of the charm of the bazaars: more accurately, I cannot. The dazzling incongruity of vendors and of wares under the over-meeting structures multiplies multiplicity. They move and cry up and down classified bazaars. A vociferous Arab hawks a cow for sale through the boot-bazaar; the delicious Arabian perfumes of the picturesque scent bazaar are fouled by a crier of insanitary food; Jews, French, Italians, Tunisians, Greeks, and Spaniards jostle each other through the alleys of the tent bazaar, braziers' bazaar, bazaar of the weavers, book bazaar—bazaar of any commodity or industry you care to name; and the proprietors and artificers squat on their tiny floors, maybe four feet square. In the busy forenoon, looking up the Mooski, it is as though the wizard had been there: almost you look for the djin to materialise. Rich colour is splashed over the stalls and the throng; there is music in the jingle of wares and the hum of voices; and the sober and graceful mosque, its rich colour gently mellowed by centuries of exposure, lifts a minaret above the animation. If this is the complexity of the broad view, what contrasts are thrust at you from the detail of men and things, as you saunter through!