"No difficulty, Sir!--no difficulty?--it is THE difficulty--we are
absolutely paralysed by the Custom House. Every box is broken open and
the contents strewed upon the ground. The duty is ad valorem upon all
articles, and an ignorant Turk is the valuer. This man does not know the
difference between a bootjack and a lemon-squeezer: only the other day
he valued wire dish-covers as `articles of head-dress,' (probably he had
seen wire fencing-masks). If he is perplexed, he is obliged to refer the
questionable article to the Chief Office,--this is two hundred yards
from the landing place:--thus he passes half the day in running
backwards and forwards with trifles of contested value to his superior,
while crowds are kept waiting, and the store is piled with goods most
urgently required." . . .
I immediately went to see this eccentric representative of Anglo-Turkish
political-and-mercantile-combination, and found very little
exaggeration in the description, except that the distance was 187 paces
instead of 200 which he had to perform, whenever the character of the
article was beyond the sphere of his experience. As this happened about
every quarter of an hour, he could not complain of a sedentary
employment. A few days after this, migratory birds arrived in Cyprus
upon the inhospitable shore opposite the Custom House in the shape of
two Liberal M.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47