Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXIV, May 1852, Vol. IVVarious
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XXIV, May 1852, Vol. IV
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
You pass on into the quarter where the pattens are made, inlaid with
pearl, such as you remarked upon the feet of the kohl-eyebrowed houris.
Into the shoemakers, where the brilliant leathers justify better poetry
than Hans Sach's interminable rhymes, though here is only their music,
not their moral. You climb crumbling steps, and emerge from darkness
upon the top of the bazaar, on a ledge of a Roman ruin, and look down
into the sunny greenness of the great mosque, which you can not more
nearly approach. Then down, and by all the beautiful fabrics of the
land, hung with the tin-foiled letters that surround pieces of English
prints, and which the color-loving eye of the Oriental seizes as an
ornament for his own wares, you pass into the region of drugs and
apothecaries, and feel that you are about visiting that Persian Doctor
in Mecca who dealt in nothing but miraculous balsams and infallible
elixirs, whose potions were all sweet and agreeable, and the musk and
aloe wood which he burned, diffused a delicious odor through the shop.
Surely he was court-physician to Zobeide.
Golden Sleeve pauses before an old figure curled among the bottles and
lost in reverie, saturated, it seems, with opium, and dreaming its
dreams. This is Zobeide's doctor. He had evidently the elixir of life
among those sweet potions, and has deeply drunk. Life he has preserved;
but little else that is human remains, except the love that is stronger
than life. For as he opens his vague eyes and beholds us, they kindle
with an inward fire, as if they looked upon the Philosopher's Stone.
That stone is in our purses; the old magician knows it, and he knows the
charm to educe it. He opens a jar, and a dreamy odor penetrates our
brains. It is distilled of flowers culled from the gardens of the
Ganges: or is this delicate perfume preferable--this zatta, loved of
poets and houris, which came to the doctor's grandfather from Bagdad?
Attar of roses did Golden Sleeve suggest? Here is the essence of that
divinest distillation of the very heart of summer. But, O opulent
Howadji! no thin, pale, Constantinople perfume is this, but the viscous
richness of Indian roses. As many wide acres of bloom went to this jar
as to any lyric of Hafiz. It lies as molten gold in the quaint glass
vase. The magician holds it toward the Syrian sun, and the shadow of a
smile darkens over his withered features. Then, drop by drop, as if he
poured the last honey that should ever be hived from Hymettus, he
suffers it to exude into the little vials. They are closely stopped, and
sealed, and wrapped in cotton. And some wintry Christmas in the West the
Howadji shall offer to a fairer than Zobeide those more than drops of
diamond.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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