BUSINESS IN THE ORIENTBY HARRY A. FRANCK
BY HARRY A. FRANCK
HEis the selfsame fellow still, the Cairene merchant, as in the days of Harun-al-Rashid. His shop may be the lower story of a great modern building, his wares the products of monster factories; yet he squats in cross-legged contentment as of yore, amenable only to the loquacious system of bargaining dear to the heart of the Oriental. The Western tourist, foolishly regarding time as of value, will lose all equanimity long before he has completed the smallest transaction. If his knowledge of the East and his patience suffice, and he begins negotiations early enough in the day not to be driven forth as the merchant sets up his shutters at nightfall, he may obtain the article he seeks at a just and equitable price. If he gains possession of it in less than the accustomed time, he will certainly have paid more than its market value, be his business acumen what it may.
Vagamundo, the Western traveler experienced in the ways of the East, catches sight, during a stroll through the bazaars, of an Arabic blade that takes his fancy. It hangs high at the top of the open booth, on the raised floor of which, close-circled by his tumbled chaos of wares, serenely squats the proprietor, with folded legs. Vagamundo, as from the merest curiosity, pauses to run his eye over the countless articles, suggests with a half-stifled yawn that the simitar looks like what might be a convincing weapon in the hands of an enemy, ventures to hope that the merchant is enjoying the fine weather, and strolls leisurely on. The shopkeeper continues to puff drowsily at his water-bottle, in his eyes the far-off look of the day-dreamer, until the Westerner is all but out of earshot. Then he appears suddenly to awake, and drones out a languid invitation to return. Vagamundo pays no heed to the summons for some moments, gazes abstractedly upon the wares displayed in another booth, then wanders slowly back toward the object that has attracted his attention. The merchant hopes that the traveler is enjoying the best of health, invites him to squat in the bit of space not already occupied by himself or his wares, offers a cigarette, and falls to discussing the latest doings of the mixed courts or the state of the cotton crop in the delta. By the time the second cigarette is lighted, he turns the conversation deftly to the simitar, and remarks that, though it is hung among his wares rather for ornament than for sale, it is possible he may some day tire of beholding it and part with it for—perhaps eleven hundred or a thousand piasters. Vagamundo, puffing reminiscently for a time, recalls having heard a friend express a desire to obtain such a weapon for, say, seventy-five piasters or so, and wonders, after all, why that friend should care for so useless an article. The shopkeeper regrets that the two prices named do not more nearly coincide, trusts that the inundations will not be so late this year as last, as, indeed, the Nilometer has prophesied they will not, and reaches again for the tube of his narghile. Vagamundo expresses his delight that the khedive has recovered from his recent attack, thanks the merchant for his disinterested hospitality, and saunters away.
The shortest instant before he is finally lost from view in the surging stream of donkeys, pedestrians, camels, runners, and bazaar-loungers he is called back to learn that the merchant is of the opinion that the new land tax will work more effectively than the old, that the simitar is probably worth only seven hundred and eighty piasters, and that some of the eucalyptus-trees in the Esbekieh Gardens are to be removed. With all due respect to Cromer Pasha Vagamundo doubts the practicability of his latest scheme of taxation, and hopes that his friend may somewhere run across such a simitar at one hundred piasters.
Thus the transaction continues: a third, a fourth, even a fifth time Vagamundo returns. By the sixth visit he has dropped the fiction of a friend, and openly offers two hundred and twenty-five piasters for the blade, and the shopkeeper arouses himself sufficiently from his lethargy to take the weapon down for inspection, and expresses a willingness to part with it for two hundred and seventy-five.
Over newly rolled cigarettes the negotiation proceeds, now touching upon the prevalence of ophthalmia, now debating the success of the recent installation of sugar factories, anon skirting the matter of simitars, their manufacture and price. Speaking of simitars, the merchant suspects that for the one in hand he would be satisfied perhaps at two hundred and fifty piasters. Vagamundo lays that sum—which both recognized from the beginning as the just price—on the mat between them, grasps his newly acquired property, and, amid protestations of lifelong friendship from the merchant, takes his departure.
Manchester business men and Chicago captains of industry, scorning such childish methods, have dived into the maelstrom of the bazaars of Cairo with the avowed intention of “doing business” after the manner of to-day and the West; but all in vain. The Cairene shopkeeper will hurry in his transactions for no mortal man. Whether his wares are purchased or not is, at least to every outward appearance, a matter to which he is at all times utterly indifferent. Let the pulsating Westerner, with his strange notions of the relative value of time and ease, press his mercenary suit too forcibly, and he discovers to his surprise, and perhaps even to his dismay, that the merchant of the East displays his wares and squats by day among them merely as a recreation and amusement, and that the notion of selling anything from the trifles about him is farthest from his thoughts.