The New England magazine . ck tents. BAGDAD, HOME OF SINDBAD 181 The modern city is a network of windinglanes, too narrow in places for horsemen,and sometimes when pedestrians meet theymust squeeze against the walls to pass. Itis more or less of a labyrinth; when the na-tives are lost in its maze their method ofextrication is to follow along the path wornI deep by the donkeys which carry the water! to the houses, for all such paths lead to the[river. Few of the native houses have win-ijdows opening upon the streets. From thelarge, open court about which the house is punkah or fan swinging from
The New England magazine . ck tents. BAGDAD, HOME OF SINDBAD 181 The modern city is a network of windinglanes, too narrow in places for horsemen,and sometimes when pedestrians meet theymust squeeze against the walls to pass. Itis more or less of a labyrinth; when the na-tives are lost in its maze their method ofextrication is to follow along the path wornI deep by the donkeys which carry the water! to the houses, for all such paths lead to the[river. Few of the native houses have win-ijdows opening upon the streets. From thelarge, open court about which the house is punkah or fan swinging from the ceilingsand with the thick camel-thorn screen,moistened to cool the passing air by evap-oration, the Bagdadi may endure the swel-tering heat of summer when the thermom-eter registers one hundred and twenty de-grees in the shade; but during the winter,when the thermometer is at freezing-point,he shivers the days away over a charcoal-brazier. The government of Bagdad is Turkish:many of the officials are exiles from Con-. Abdul Kadr, the largest mosque in Bagdad fuilt open the kitchen, the rooms for thesrvants, and the half underground serdaubsrhich serve as a refuge from the heat ofLimmer. On the second floor are the living-i ooms, and above is the flat roof where dur-I ng the six hot months of the year the fam-sl ly retires for the evening meal, and sleepsiflijintil the morning sun drives them (There is an unwritten law that the Bagdadiven nay not gaze over the railing of his roof tolit lis neighbors harem; if the harems hus-jzcl >and is present the law is seldom J With the underground serdaub providedil vith air-shafts reaching to the roof, with a stantinople; others have purchased from theSublime Porte the right to plunder the prov-ince. Half of its hundred thousand inhab-itants are Arabs and Persian Moslems; theother fifty thousand, with the exception ofa few Chaldaeans and Armenians, are Jews,the descendants of the Hebrews who wereexiled from Jer
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookidnewenglandma, bookyear1887
