Journal 40, page 08

April 28, 1870

Dr. L. takes out a stick, a foot long, with a curled up hand at the end of it & asks me to guess what its use is? Posted [?] up by recent readings of Gautiers bazar pictures, I respond "a back scratcher" & "get my guess." We go through the Egyptian (or drug) bazar, which is very extensive & surprises me anew with the riches of the vegetable world in the East. Baskets piled up with strangely colored products in lump & powder of which even Dr. L. can not explain the use. We sit along wide, low tables, on each side of a building of gigantic proportions-arched at the top, & cool, dark & very inviting I should think in a hot day. The amber bazar would have been the dispair of a smoker;-the mouthpieces, pipes & cigar-holders being in every form of grace & luxury. Walking along we meet half a dozen Turkish ladies, nicely dressed & freshly veiled-two of them jet black & all sisters of the same Harem, going to the bath, where the Dr. says they will spend most of the day in the water (having taken their luncheon) gossiping, splashing about & listening to singing girls with guitars or watching the motions of dancing-with their castinets. What a life-what a waste of the raw material of civilization & of progress! Dr. L. tells me about his mission & its anxieties [?], & dwells upon his cherished project of founding a school for Bulgarian women. But he moans the lack of teachers-the apathy at home- & wishes that some of our young ladies felt a call to come. I am surprised that a field so inviting should lack laborers. How many of "my girls" would come if they could realize the need-& withal that [?] they would not leave the planet nor its comforts in coming even to Turkey. For myself if I did not believe I had another work before me, I should seriously consider the project of a girl's school in Constantinople.

Another morning in the bazars where considerable execution [?] is done, it being an understood fact that this is "positively our last" visit. At its close, after a scamper through the goldsmith's quarter, Dr. Long conducts me to the Bazar of Arms, which certainly more than any place I have seen in the East, realizes my idea of what such a place should be according to the travelers who like Eliot Warburton write romance-pictures of their Oriental observations. The opulence of merchandise-the heaped up shelves, counters & corners, making those of other parts of the bazar seem European in their orderly arrangement, by comparison; the dim light, aromatic odors, medly of costume & of language, style of merchandise-"rococo" & "vertu" being words most discriptive of it-all profoundly & most pleasantly impressed me & my hurried glances at it all yielded me pictures to which my fancy will turn with genuine enjoyment.

-We went again to the Mosque of Bazaret [?] to see the cunning pigeons fed, & it was a new [?] lesson in the instincts of the speechless creation, to see them all fly down to their feeding platform when Dr. L. placed a para in the hand of the old worthy who had them in charge,-awaiting no further indication of the coming repast.-We