The streets outside are sloppy with melting snow, and the roofed passages of the bazaar, being dry underfoot, are crowded with people to an unusual extent; albeit they are pretty well crowded at any time.  Most of the dervishes in the city have been driven, by the inclemency of the weather, to seek shelter in the bazaar; these, added to the no small number who make the place their regular foraging ground, render them a greater nuisance than ever.  They are encountered in such numbers, that no matter which way I turn, I am confronted by a rag-bedecked mendicant, with a wild, haggard countenance and grotesque costume, thrusting out his gourd alms-receiver, and muttering “huk yah huk!” each in his own peculiar way.  The mollahs, with their flowing robes, and huge white turbans, likewise form no inconsiderable proportion of the moving throng; they are almost without exception scrupulously neat and clean in appearance, and their priestly costume and Pharisaical deportment gives them a certain air of stateliness.  They wear the placid expression of men so utterly puffed up with the notion of their own sanctity, that their self-consciousness verily scorns to shine through their skins, and to impart to them a sleek, oily appearance.  One finds himself involuntarily speculating on how they all manage to make a living; the mollah “toils not, neither does he spin,” and almost every other person one meets is a mollah.

The bazaar is a common thoroughfare for anything and everything that can make its way through.  Donkey-riders, horsemen, and long strings of camels and pack-mules add their disturbing influence to the general confusion; and although hundreds of stalls are heaped up with every merchantable thing in the city, scores of donkeys laden with similar products are meandering about among the crowd, the venders shouting their wares with lusty lungs.  In many places the din is quite deafening, and the odors anything but agreeable to European nostrils; but the natives are not over fastidious.  The steam issuing from the cook-shops, from coppers of soup, pillau and sheeps’-trotters, and the less objectionable odors from places where busy men are roasting bazaar-kabobs for hungry customers all day long, mingle with the aromatic contributions from the spice and tobacco shops wedged in between them.

The sleek-looking spice merchant, squatting contentedly beside a pan of glowing embers, smoking kalian after kalian in dreamy contemplation of his assistant waiting on customers, and also occasionally waiting on him to the extent of replenishing the fire on the kalian, is undoubtedly the happiest of mortals.  With a kabob-shop on one hand, a sheeps’-trotter-shop on the other, and a bakery and a fruit-stand opposite, he indulges in tid-bits from either when he is hungry.  With nothing to do but smoke kalians amid the fragrant aroma of his own spices, and keep a dreamy eye on what passes on around him, his Persian notions of a desirable life cause him to regard himself as blest