Page:From Constantinople to the home of Omar Khayyam.djvu/407

 wine, to wash it down. The conversation was kept lively by All's incessant chatter with the booth-keepers, to whose res- taurantal favor he had commended us. The little fellow's own importance was meanwhile steadily growing with the ever- enlarging number of merchants who came from the neighbor- ing shops and sought to induce the urchin to let us inspect their wares.

A tour through the shops was accordingly begun ; but Ali had no intention of allowing his two foreign visitors to be mer- cilessly cheated or even unduly overcharged by a single trades- man; for, whenever he thought the price unreasonable, he promptly and firmly insisted that we should not purchase ; and he always saw to it that we received the correct amount of change for every purchase, even in so small a matter as an old Nishapur lock and key, which I bought because of Omar's metaphorical mention of the key (miftdK) to unlock the treas- ures of meaning, although FitzGerald's version of the stanza is a different one.^ We really wondered how the little fellow dared to be so judicially impartial. For that reason I have often thought of Ali since, and have felt that if he did collect any commission later on the sales, he fully earned any percent- age he may have received.

The main public square, or maiddn (pronounced here, as elsewhere, 'maydoon'), in the midst of the bazar was a small quadrangle measuring hardly a hundred feet on either side. It was not a place for a great concourse of people, as must have been the Murabba'ah al-Kabirah, or 'Great Square,' in the market mentioned by the Arab geographers in the tenth century, before the destruction of the older city, described below.2 Nor was it a grand campus like the vast Maidan at

1 See FG. 1 ed. 32 = 4 ed. 32, and man) ; and for the line FG. 55 (76) the

compare Th. 65, P. 628, Wh. 389. For Persian has literally ' a key for the trea»-

the image of the ' door to which I found ures of spiritual meanings he made.' no key' the Persian (Th. 32) has 'the 2 On the 'Great Square' and the

secrets of eternity neither thou knowest 'Little Square' at Nishapur see Le

nor I ' (asrdr-i azalra nah tu ddnl u nah Strange, p. 384.

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