Only Fifteen Piastres Are Paid For A Camel From Cairo To Suez, Which Is Double The Distance Between Djidda And Mekka.] It Is By The Ass-Caravan That Letters Are Conveyed Between The Two Towns.

In time of peace, caravans are occasionally met with on the sea-coast, towards Yemen, and the interior of Tehama, to Mokhowa, whence corn is imported.

(V. Appendix on the Geography of the Hedjaz.)

The following enumeration of the different shops in the principal commercial street of Djidda, may throw some light on the

[p.25] trade of the town, as well as on the mode of living of its inhabitants.

The shops (as in all parts of Turkey) are raised several feet above ground, and have before them, projecting into the street, a stone bench, on which purchasers seat themselves; this is sheltered from the sun by an awning usually made of mats fastened to high poles. Many of the shops are only six or seven feet wide in front; the depth is generally from ten to twelve feet, with a small private room or magazine behind.

There are twenty-seven coffee-shops. Coffee is drunk to excess in the Hedjaz; it is not uncommon for persons to drink twenty or thirty cups in one day, and the poorest labourer never takes less than three or four cups. In a few of the shops may be had keshre, made from the skin of the bean, which is scarcely inferior in flavour to that made from the bean itself. One of the shops is frequented by those who smoke the hashysh, or a preparation of hemp-flowers mixed with tobacco, which produces a kind of intoxication. Hashysh is still more used in Egypt, especially among the peasants. [Of the hemp-flowers, they use for this purpose the small leaves standing round the seed, (called sheranek.) The common people put a small quantity of them upon the top of the tobacco with which their pipes are filled. The higher classes eat it in a jelly or paste (maadjoun) made in the following manner: - a quantity of the leaves is boiled with butter for several hours, and then put under a press; the juice so expressed is mixed with honey and other sweet drugs, and publicly sold in Egypt, where shops are kept for that purpose. The Hashysh paste is politely termed bast, and those who sell it basty (i.e. cheerfulness). On the occasion of a festival to celebrate the marriage of a son of one of the principal grandees at Cairo, when all the different crafts of the town were represented in a showy procession, the basty, although exercising a business prohibited and condemned by the law, was among the most gaudy. Many persons of the first rank use the bast in some shape or other; it exhilarates the spirits, and raises the imagination as violently as opium. Some persons also mix the paste with seeds of the Bendj, which comes from Syria.]

In all these shops the Persian pipe is smoked, of which there

[p.26] are three different sorts.

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