Incensuous Affairs

Like any travel-weary nomad, I usually return with an entire caravan's worth of exotic goods from the places I go to. Moroccan lamps, turkish carpets, arabian incense etc. Far from a measly straw on the camel's back, I usually have the goods packed high enough to the brim that it would have my frugal brother's brows knotting in frustration.

Think it's about time I started a curiousity shoppe!

But what else could you buy from the exotic Middle East but incense! Piled high in almost every other store with glittering vials filled with hypnotic scents that harken back to ancient times long past. Seems the use of incense dates back to near-biblical times and may have originated in Egypt, where the gums and resins of aromatic trees were imported from the Arabian and Somali coasts to be used in religious ceremonies.


Wonder what else I can buy!
After all if the Three Kings thought it worth the buy for baby Jesus, dare I refuse?

Though frankincense and myrrh they brought as offerings, I doubt they added an incense burner into that particular Christmas package. Since the incense burners offered here are all shockingly pricey, ornate and ghastly to boot. No doubt the austere Mother Mary would have balked at such flashy, tacky bling. What would the judgemental neighbours in Nazareth say!

So I turned up my nose on the frightful metallic towers and opted for a humbler choice. After viewing several dozen burners, I managed to find a particularly simple earthen incense burner in a sleepy back-alley souk. As the mustachioed storekeeper eagerly showed me, it seemed easy enough to light up an incense burner. Or at least that's what I thought.

Obviously just flicking a match and dropping it on charcoal doesn't work. Almost burned the house down before getting the hang of lighting one of those little charcoal disks. Exhausted nearly half my supply of matches - and ended up covered in black soot like the proverbial little match girl. Damn. Should have gotten the handy lil butane torch that the storekeeper offered.

Still I finally managed to get the charcoal - and hence the incense - burning, which is quite fortunate since there seems there's an unusual stench in the air back home. Stinks to high heaven. If I was the sort to leap to improbable conclusions, I might believe that a rotting corpse had been buried in my yard.

It must have been serendipity that I had incense at the ready to mask the stench!