Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of TravelBell, Gertrude Lowthian
Science
Safar Nameh, Persian Pictures: A Book Of Travel
Bell, Gertrude Lowthian
Iran -- Description and travel
With the glitter of this vain pomp before our eyes, we idled on a
windy Friday through one of the poorer quarters of the town. A bazaar
was being held in Kassim Pasha; women were bargaining over their weekly
purchases of dried fruits and grains and household goods; copper pots
lay in shining rows among the coarse crockery and the flowers and cheap
luxuries of the poor; the sun shone upon veils and turbans and bronzed
faces. It was the hour of mid-day prayer, the little mosque at the end
of the street was full to overflowing, the people were kneeling all
down the sunny outer steps, rising and falling, bowing their heads upon
the stone at the name of God. We paused a moment, and went on round
the mosque. In the shadow of a neglected corner behind it, supported
on a couple of trestles, lay something swathed in coarse blue linen,
with a stick planted into the ground at its head, and surmounted by a
discoloured fez. It was the corpse of a man which lay waiting there
until the mid-day prayers should be concluded, and his relations could
find time for his burial. The wind flapped the corners of his blue
cotton coverings to and fro, and shook the worn-out fez, but the dead
man waited patiently upon the pleasure of the living--perhaps he knew
that he was already forgotten and was content.
In Turkish cities the graves are scattered up and down and anywhere;
the stone lattice-work of a saint’s tomb breaks the line of houses
in every street of Stamboul; wherever there is a little patch of
disused ground, there spring a couple of cypresses under which half a
dozen tombstones lean awry, and solemn Turkish children play in and
out among the graves. We, too, scrambled down the slopes between the
half-obliterated mounds, and stood under the shadow of their guardian
trees, until the nodding stone turbans wore to us as familiar an aspect
as the turbaned heads before the coffee shop in the street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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