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COMMERCIAL KHANS OF TOKAT 119
Here Achmet sat down and wiped his brow and
smoked a cigarette, and the look of complete satisfaction
that he showed, not only in face but posture,
told how deeply his pride had been engaged.
The old commercial khans of Tokat, dark, stonewalled,
massive buildings, testify to great earlier
trade. Like the Tash Khan at Marsovan, they are
places of security from fire and brawl and raid, in which
merchants keep their goods and do their business in
safety, but seem of earlier date. Such buildings are
the bazaars of great cities done in little for the
country towns, and have the same Eastern atmosphere
and scenes and smells. One of these picturesque Tokat
khans had a stone fountain in the middle of the courtyard.
A few small trees grew scattered about. Over
a high horizontal trellis of poles a vine was trained,
apparently to provide shelter for standing animals.
In the open quadrangle stood bales of tobacco, bags
of barley and wheat, bundles of shovels and iron rods,
and stacks of skins, firewood, and charcoal — simple
merchandise of a simple land — and doves by the
hundred fed on spilled grain.
The castle and rock rose not far from this khan,
dark and impending above red-tiled roofs, and sharply
defined against a clear sky. There was a subtle quality
in the stronghold seen thus, something of the sort
you perceive in pictures of imaginary castles placed
in imaginary lands of romance. Yet castle and rock
made a combination evidently belonging to days of wild
reality ; and viewed from the yard of the old khan,
where camels and asses and strangely dressed figures
were coming and going amidst goods of primitive
commerce, seemed to fill out a sunlit scene of the
Middle Ages into which, somehow, I had delightfully
wandered. In these surroundings the present merchants
of Tokat, all showing the unlikeable eye of
gain-seekers, did their dealings. And here their clerks
sat cross-legged wherever they could find shade and
a comfortable spot, and smoked incessantly, and wrote
with reed pens, and dusted their writing with pounce.