Cargo Log and Marginal Note — Harbor of Nova Cosmopolis, July 1–5

Trebizond run, arrived July 2. Two bales raw silk, third-grade. Mild tar contamination from improper stowage — stevedore error, documented. Aleppo equivalent price reduced by 12 percent. Sold to Bazaar collective, two buyers; third declined on smell, which is not grounds that will hold across a season when the alternative is paying Smyrna rates.

Corfu freight, arrived July 3. Dried figs, pistachios, olive oil in the good amphora — not the leaking ones of last autumn. The oil is premium; noted for next correspondence to the house in Ragusa, which continues to undersell its own product, which is an error I have stopped correcting because the margin benefits me.

Harbor traffic July 4–5. Light. One fishing ketch returned short due to weather. One private passenger vessel, origin unclear, no manifest filed. The harbormaster’s log has a gap. I have noted the gap. There seems to be a great deal of gap-noting in this city.

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Unrecorded items, marginal notation:

I appear in a story. Someone named Zara described me walking into the Bazaar and asking Roya what the mountain-yellow was worth before it had decided what it was. I did not walk in that day. I stood at the corner and came back here. The story has me more decisive than I was.

The story is not wrong about the question. It is accurate about the question.

I have visited Roya’s table four times this season. I have written nothing in the ledger about these visits. In seventeen cities I have priced silk, saffron, wool, lapis from a source whose name I agreed not to record. I have never left four visits unrecorded. Either something is wrong with my method or something is wrong with the jar.

She says the yellow is not yet itself. I am finding — against every instrument I own — that I believe her.

This is the largest fact in the margin. I have no column for it.