One year there was a little boy dangerously ill with inflammation of the lungs when the great day came round. It was considered quite out of the question for any of the family to stay away from the play to nurse him, and being a boy he was not likely to obey the woman servant who was being left in charge of the house. “He would have been all over the roof trying to get a glimpse of the play,” his mother said, “and probably would have fallen off, so we had to take him.” So they took a mattress for him, and he lay and listened to the play from a gallery, and of course got up to watch the exciting parts. It very nearly killed him, but they seemed to feel they had taken the only reasonable course, and he eventually recovered.
In a Persian town there is a curious arrangement of the shops. All the shops where one kind of article is sold are generally grouped together in one street or _bāzār_. To buy shoes we go to the shoe bazaar, for cooking pots to the copper bazaar.
The copper or brass bazaar is almost always worth a visit in a Persian town. It is a long roofed-in street with a continuous row of small shops on either side. The “shop” consists of a lock-up room with a small mud platform in front of it, raised a foot or two above the street. On this platform are two or three stumps on which the pots are placed for hammering, for after being heated over a charcoal brazier they are hammered and beaten into the required shape, thickness and pattern. On nearly every platform is a man, sometimes two or three men and boys, hammering each on his copper pot and the noise produced by a hundred or more men hammering vigorously on copper vessels, which give different notes according to size, shape and thickness, is deafening, but not wholly disagreeable.[B]
But there is another bazaar well worth a visit in Yezd at any rate. The shops here have counters rising in tiers, so as to display the very tempting goods to advantage. The goods themselves are chiefly laid out on huge round copper trays, about a yard across and very heavy, made in the bazaar we have just left, but whitened over, as all copper vessels are.
Surely we are in Fairyland at last. Shop after shop shows tier upon tier of the most delicious sweets in the most tempting profusion. Here is _pashmak_, looking like cotton wool and tasting something like butter creams. There are two or three kinds of almond toffee, or _sōn_--some with green pistachio nuts in it. Huge fondants, or _lōz_, in diamond-shaped cakes, nearly as large as the ordinary penny fancy cakes in England, alternate with similar cakes of green _pari-tā’ūs_ (peacock’s feathers), and brown _bāghalavā_, richer and stickier than either.
