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0019 Across Asia : vol.1
Across Asia : vol.1 / Page 19 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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[Photo] A Sart village at Chirchiq.

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doi: 10.20676/00000221
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

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RECORDS OF THE JOURNEY

A Sari village a1

Chirchiq.

     

flitting along a dusty road or street like ghosts, never stopping or being spoken to in the lively throng of loud-voiced men. In the heat that often exceeds 50°C, when no breath of wind refreshes the parched vegetation, this heavy, closed garb must be a torture. The men spend the whole day outside at their work or talking with each other, stretched out on wooden platforms, often covered with beautiful carpets, in front of the cafés or sitting on benches or steps outside their houses and mosques. The bazaars in the old town consist of covered-in streets with small shops alongside each other, where you find dealers in all the simpler kinds of goods. At certain times of the day and especially on Wednesdays the bazaar is thronged by thousands of people who come to do their shopping or satisfy their curiosity. Men on horseback or on frail little donkeys, enormous »arbahs» on two wheels, 7 feet in diameter, the driver, with his feet resting on the shafts, being seated on some blankets or rugs thrown over a short-seated saddle to make it softer, crowd the narrow, winding street. This variegated and noisy bazaar, where you seldom, if ever, hear a quarrel, is exceptionally interesting. In the simple shops the entire stock seldom represents a value of more than a few hundred roubles, but they are all well kept and neat. In a smithy you find a fire with z bellows, a heap of charcoal next to it, a pile of newly forged horseshoes and the smith's tidy bed below some engravings with a few dozen old horseshoes arranged symetrically and tidily in rows under the bed. The whole space scarcely occupies 4 square metres. In almost all cases all the dealers in the same kind of goods are grouped together and in the immediate neighbourhood you find those who deal in a similar article made of the same raw materials. The Sarts who live in the towns are strikingly neat in their dress. The turbans of those who can write are dazzlingly white, those of others many-coloured. When a Sart starts on a journey, he takes several turbans with him in order to have one that will do as a winding-sheet in case of his death. The light and frequently light-coloured khalats he wears in the heat of the summer are usually clean, no easy matter to achieve in such a dusty town. He appears to

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