Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/135

Rh The, as the Greeks call Colnaghi, is also not a bad hand at bargaining for a coin. We go out all three together into the villages, and hold long parleys with the natives, seated on the raised platform of the rustic kafé, each on a little low stool, with a cup of coffee in his hand and a paper cigarette in his mouth. In order to succeed in this sort of traffic, it is necessary to address people in their own language and in their own way, smoke out of their very dirty pipe if they offer it, drink their coffee, and employ every art to ingratiate oneself with them. Then, by degrees, comes out the very information you are in search of. After you have sat for about an hour, and have in vain demanded coins (mongoures, as they call them), some fellow comes up and produces a battered Byzantine coin; then comes another. If you buy, the mere sight of a piastre brings a whole crowd round you. Then the plan is, to get on your mule and move a few yards towards home; upon which the price instantly begins to fall. You ride on; the crowd gradually tails off, till, about two hundred yards from the village, you are entreated to buy the particular coin which you secretly wished to have, but did not venture outwardly to show any anxiety about.

A few days ago our solitude was broken in upon by two travellers who crossed over from Assos on the opposite coast,—a young Irishman and a somewhat apathetic and beery German from Saxony, and who, being desirous of seeing something of Mytilene, started on a little tour with me. The first part of