Xpilar Imagination 2: Visit to a Rendezvous Shop

I am writing this little blog to enter @xpilar imagination competition 2 (two) on today 12/12/2017, this competition remind of events which I witness here some years back.

I came to spend my holiday with a cousin of mine who lived in Lagos State. As I had entered, in an idle mood, the shop of one of those curiosity venders in the city called Lagos, which is so perfectly unintelligible elsewhere in Nigeria. You have doubtless glanced occasionally through the windows of some of these shops, which have become so numerous now that it is fashionable to buy antiquated furniture. There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in old iron, the ware-room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the chemist, and the studio of the painter: in all those gloomy dens where a furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters the most manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than the gimp laces, and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived from abroad.

The warehouse of this shop is all excite me most. All ages and all nations seemed to have made their rendezvous there. There you see an Etruscan lamp of red clay stood upon a Boule cabinet, with ebony panels, brightly striped by lines of inlaid brass; a duchess of the court. Nonchalantly extended her fawn-like feet under a massive table of the high class people (Highly Influential), with heavy spiral supports of oak, and carven designs of chimeras and foliage intermingled.

Upon the finely dentate shelves of several sideboards glittered immense cultural beautiful dishes with red and blue designs relieved by gilded hatching, side by side with opaque and glassy coating baked works, representing serpents, frogs, and lizards in relief. From eviscerate cabinets escaped cascades of silver-lustrous Chinese silks and waves of tinsel, which an oblique sunbeam shot through with luminous diverse of cultural beads, while portraits of every era, in frames more or less tarnished, smiled through their yellow varnish. The striped breastplate of a damascened suit of a great warrior armor glittered in one corner; loves and nymphs of porcelain, old cups encumbered the shelves and nooks of the apartment.

The dealer followed me closely through the tortuous way contrived between the piles of furniture, warding off with his hand the hazardous sweep of my coat-skirts, watching my elbows with the uneasy attention of an antiquarian and a usurer. It was a singular face, that of the merchant; an immense skull, polished like a knee, and surrounded by a thin aureole of white hair, which brought out the clear salmon tint of his complexion all the more strikingly, lent him a false aspect of patriarchal bonhomie, counteracted, however, by the scintillation of two little yellow eyes which trembled in their orbits. The curve of his nose presented an aquiline silhouette, which suggested the Oriental or Jewish type. His hands thin, slender, full of nerves which projected like strings upon the finger-board of a violin, and armed with claws like those on the terminations of bats' wings hook with senile trembling; but those convulsively agitated hands became firmer than steel pincers or lobsters' claws when they lifted any precious article like an onyx cup. A venetian glass, or a dish of crystal. This strange old man had an aspect so thoroughly rabbinical and cabalistic that he would have been burnt on the mere testimony of his face three centuries ago.

'Will you not buy something from me to-day, sir? Here is age’s beads, I can see it will look beautiful on you. Look at those Aso-ofi cloth contrived for the fine ofi shoes. It is a fine character of ferocious arm, and will look well in your collection. This two-handed wrist beads is very beautiful. It is the work from best bead maker egbaa’s; and this ring with a superb specimen of handicraft!' 'No; I have quite enough of shoes and Aso-Ofi. I want a small figure, something which will suit me and make look like a real prince, for I cannot continue with those junk beads which the stationers sell, and which may be found on everybody's neck.'

The age’s Aso-Ofi foraged among his ancient wears are finally arranged before me, some antique Aso-Ofi and a fine gold old rings, representing the true price I am.

I told the merchant if can get a gold foot, 'Ha, ha, you want the foot of the Prince exclaimed the merchant, with a strange giggle, fixing his owlish eyes upon me. 'Ha, ha, ha! Someone must have told you to come here and look your choice. I told him that the foot of gold usually adored in the age’s how I wish I can get one which would be used during the festival of Isu (yam festival) in my country home. Continued the queer little merchant, half audibly, as though talking to himself.

'How much will you charge me for this foot gold fragment?'

In the first place you can see that I laugh not at you but laughed about what you said “Foot Gold” have never seen one in my life although I heard from the history which my dad told me before he passed on says the merchant, I told him 'You speak as if you were born in age’s perhaps I should add that you are old enough, but you never once see foot gold? He answered, laughingly, from the threshold and said my son of a truth I am old enough but I never see foot gold in my entire life. Maybe because I wasn’t from royal family. I went home, delighted with my procured items.

Thank to for reading my blog.
Have a nice day.

@dabbey.