Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 17

up on the quaysides, merchandise from all over the world. There were special ships from Syria that landed exotic silk from somewhere far to the east, beyond the edge of the earth someone once told me. It arrived in bales wrapped tightly in woollen sacks which from the outside looked distinctly uninteresting. But I had seen them carefully unwrapped in the special warehouses away from the dockside and they were absolutely magnificent. I remember seeing one merchant unrolling a bale and the vibrant colours of the fabric appeared to cascade all over the floor. The decorations on the individual bolts of cloth were fantastic, woven with beautiful mythical beasts in colours so bright they almost seemed alive. There were huge flowers and trees, all in greens, reds, whites and browns, all colours of the rainbow and so finely crafted you wondered, as they lay there glowing in the sunlight, if any human fingers could be nimble enough to produce such incredible pictures as they did.

The silk merchants were a rather aloof class and wealthy too. They would speak in reverential tones about the textures, the knot values and the prices, which seemed so out of this world they were like the very silk itself. I wondered who would wear such exotic fabrics, but it seemed there was an inexhaustible demand for this material among the endless rich matriarchs of the imperial capital, Rome and these appetites must be being passed on to their daughters too. I doubted I would ever see

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS