Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 September 1884 — The City of Perfume. [ARTICLE]

The City of Perfume.

The Tunisian Arabs have a passion for flowers, and as seen as their spring commences, even the poorest and ragged est may be seen with a delicately scented blossom stuck above his ear, the stalk resting amid the folds of his turban and the flower projecting forward over his dark cheek. I have been told by those who have thirty years’ knowledge of these people, that they will almost go without bread to buy flowers. And there is something in the sight of a gaunt, toil-worn Arab, whose sole garments may consist of a piece of coarse%wSking and a ragged old turban, with a bunch of delicate spring blossonjs drooping their cool freshness against his sparthy cheek, which stirs a strange mingling of sympathy and pity and admiration. The perfumes distilled at Tunis have been famous from time immemorial, and I really : think the Tunisians are right when they declare that their roses are sweeter than all others. There is one very large, rather pale rose-in particular, from which the famous attar is extracted, which exhales an odor as powerful and yet so delicate that it scarcely seems a figure of speech to speak of “odors of Paradise;” and one can understand that the Mohammedan’s heaven would hardly be complete without it. But at Tunis it is hot only the rose which is made to yield up its sweet breath, to be afterward imprisoned in cunning little caskets and sparkling crystal flasks enriched w/th gilding, suggesting to the wandering fancy of the Arabian Nights’haunted traveler (and who is there who is not haunted by that wonderful book from the moment he finds himself among Oriental iscenes?) the imprisoned spirit of some fairy, in eternal subjection to the powerful genii man. The odors of the violet, the jasmine, the orange flower, and many others are extracted with equal skill, and in the bazaars mingle their scents with the perfume of sandal wood and other sweet-smelling woods whose names I do not know, and with that of the curious, most odoriferous dark substance which the natives call amber. If you go to buy perfumes the vender will probably offer you a little ivory box (Arabian Nights again!) or porcelain vase containing a scented unguent for the hair, or maybe a string of beads to hang around your neck, apparently thinking it of small consequence in what way you perfume your person so that the desired odor is conveyed to the senses. In Arab households incense and sandal wood are frequently burned on charcoal braziers. The Arabian women of the higher class are extravagantly fond of highly scented earrings, bracelets, etc., and a lady told me that on being introduced into the apartment of a newly married wife she saw suspended on the wall a magnificent kind of ilecklace, almost as large as the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, formed of scented woods and amber, enriched with plates and beads of pure gold, finely worked. This ornament perfumed the whole apartment, and my friend was informed that in well-to-do households it was always to be found in the chamber of the newest wife. —All the Year Bound.