Chapter 17

They Regale Themselves With Their Pipes

"Ho! mortals! mortals!" cried Media. "Go we to bury our dead? Awake,
sons of men! Cheer up, heirs of immortality! Ho, Vee-Vee! bring forth
our pipes: we'll smoke off this cloud."

Nothing so beguiling as the fumes of tobacco, whether inhaled through
hookah, narghil, chibouque, Dutch porcelain, pure Principe, or
Regalia. And a great oversight had it been in King Media, to have
omitted pipes among the appliances of this voyage that we went.
Tobacco in rouleaus we had none; cigar nor cigarret; which little the
company esteemed. Pipes were preferred; and pipes we often smoked;
testify, oh! Vee-Vee, to that. But not of the vile clay, of which
mankind and Etruscan vases were made, were these jolly fine pipes of
ours. But all in good time.

Now, the leaf called tobacco is of divers species and sorts. Not to
dwell upon vile Shag, Pig-tail, Plug, Nail-rod, Negro-head, Cavendish,
and misnamed Lady's-twist, there are the following varieties:--Gold-
leaf, Oronoco, Cimaroza, Smyrna, Bird's-eye, James-river, Sweet-
scented, Honey-dew, Kentucky, Cnaster, Scarfalati, and famed Shiraz,
or Persian. Of all of which, perhaps the last is the best.

But smoked by itself, to a fastidious wight, even Shiraz is not gentle
enough. It needs mitigation. And the cunning craft of so mitigating
even the mildest tobacco was well understood in the dominions of
Media. There, in plantations ever covered with a brooding, blue haze,
they raised its fine leaf in the utmost luxuriance; almost as broad as
the broad fans of the broad-bladed banana. The stalks of the leaf
withdrawn, the remainder they cut up, and mixed with soft willow-bark,
and the aromatic leaves of the Betel.

"Ho! Vee-Vee, bring forth the pipes," cried Media. And forth they
came, followed by a quaint, carved cocoa-nut, agate-lidded, containing
ammunition sufficient for many stout charges and primings.

Soon we were all smoking so hard, that the canopied howdah, under
which we reclined, sent up purple wreaths like a Michigan wigwam.
There we sat in a ring, all smoking in council--every pipe a halcyon
pipe of peace.

And among those calumets, my lord Media's showed like the turbaned
Grand Turk among his Bashaws. It was an extraordinary pipe, be sure;
of right royal dimensions. Its mouth-piece an eagle's beak; its long
stem, a bright, red-barked cherry-tree branch, partly covered with a
close network of purple dyed porcupine quills; and toward the upper
end, streaming with pennons, like a Versailles flag-staff of a
coronation day. These pennons were managed by halyards; and after
lighting his prince's pipe, it was little Vee-Vee's part to run them
up toward the mast-head, or