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THE BAZAARS 421
embroidery, and lace and garments of white and scarlet
and blue and brown and green and orange, are the
daily style of these people, and the colours are always
pleasing and never crude. The bazaars are in gloom
except where bars of sunlight enter from small windows,
and these white shafts strike through a blue
haze of smoke which fills the vault. The bazaar smell
is a compound of tobacco and spice, new carpets and
merchandise, animals, human beings, fruit, vegetables
—of everything which moves, of everything which
can be bought or sold or used. To the Aleppo boil
and Aleppo look, as peculiar to the city, you may add
the Aleppo smell.
Everything of the East, and almost everything of the
West, may be found in these packed bazaars. Brass
and silver work from India are here ; Chinese ivories
and porcelain ; silks and prints, carpets and rugs from
every cotton -printing and carpet -weaving district
between China and the Bosphorus. The peculiar
linens and embroideries of near-by Marash are seen,
so also Japanese lacquered bowls, African beadwork,
French photographic films, and American sewing
- machines. Do you want Mauser or Colt or
Browning automatic pistols, here they are of every
calibre and price. For Manchester goods you turn to
the right, for Sheffield ware to the left ; for goods of
different sorts have each their own part of the bazaar.
A shop outwardly may be little more than a stall, but
go inside, show a wish to buy, and you find the stall
extending into dim caverns of its own behind, all
packed with goods : the holder of one such outwardly
modest stall blandly told me that his stock was worth
twenty thousand pounds English.
Interest of another sort belongs to the great commercial
khans representing the warehouses and wholesale
trade, where the caravans arrive and depart, by
which, till now, merchandise from all parts of the
world reached and left Aleppo—for the distributing
trade also is a great one.
The typical Jchan of this kind is a stone building