an, or caravansera. This was a great
barn-like building, two stories high, with broken staircases and
creaking floors. A corridor ran the whole length of the second floor,
with some twenty or thirty doors opening into it from the separate rooms
of the traders. We accosted the first Tartar whom we met; and he
promised, with great readiness, to procure us what we wanted. He ushered
us into his room, cleared away a pile of bags, saddles, camel-trappings,
and other tokens of a nomadic life, and revealed a low divan covered
with a ragged carpet. On a sack of barley sat his father, a blind
graybeard, nearly eighty years old. On our way through the camp I had
noticed that the Tartars saluted each other with the Arabic, "_Salaam
aleikoom_!" and I therefore greeted the old man with the familiar
words. He lifted his head: his face brightened, and he immediately
answered, "_Aleikoom salaam_, my son!"

"Do you speak Arabic?" I asked.

"A little; I have forgotten it," said he. "But thine is a new voice. Of
what tribe art thou?"

"A tribe far away, beyond Bagdad and Syria," I answered.

"It is the tribe of Damascus. I know it now, my son. I have heard the
voice, many, many years ago."

The withered old face looked so bright, as some pleasant memory shone
through it, that I did not undeceive the man. His son came in with a
glass, pulled a keg from under a pile of coarse caftans, and drew out
the wooden peg. A gray liquid, with an odor at once sour and pungent,
spirted into the glass, which he presently handed to me, filled to the
brim. In such cases no hesitation is permitted. I thought of home and
family, set the glass to my lips, and emptied it before the flavor made
itself clearly manifest to my palate.

"Well, what is it like?" asked my friend, who curiously awaited the
result of the experiment.

"Peculiar," I answered, with preternatural calmness,--"peculiar, but not
unpleasant."

The glass was filled a second time; and P., not to be behindhand,
emptied it at a draught. Then he turned to me with tears (not of
delight) in his eyes, swallowed nothing very hard two or three times,
suppressed a convulsive shudder, and finally remarked, with the air of a
martyr, "Very curious, indeed!"

"Will your Excellencies have some more?" said the friendly Tartar.

"Not before breakfast, if you please," I answered; "your koumiss is
excellent, however, and we will take a bottle with us,"--which we did,
in order to satisfy the possible