DATE-STICK CRADLE.
When the baby is forty days old and has received its name a new date-stick cradle is triumphantly brought home from the market and the new baby placed in it. And then Master or Miss Arab will get such a violent rocking that no Christian baby could stand. The ground is uneven, for there are no wooden floors in Arabia, and the rockers are nearly straight so that you can imagine it is not the pleasantest thing in the world to be rocked in an Arab cradle. In the picture you can see just what a date-stick cradle is like.
Arab babies cry a great deal; what with sand storms and flies and other insects they generally have sore eyes and apparently need strong treatment to make them quiet and give their mothers and sisters time to grind the wheat and churn the butter. Everything is made fresh each day in an Arab household. The rice must be cooked for the daily meal, the wheat ground for bread, and the milk put into the leather churn. These people have no ice chest, not even cupboards, many of them, so the coffee is freshly roasted and pounded in a mortar for breakfast. The flour is taken to the hand-mill and butter comes out of the churn every day fresh. Then the mother will have to draw the daily supply of water and wash the few clothes at the well. The better classes have their slaves to do the hard work but the Bedouin women and the poor have to do all the toil and never get a rest. Rich and poor are alike in not having any intellectual pleasures. Few can read and even those who can read, are able to read only the Koran and the Moslem traditions. The children have no primers or picture-books, and no Arab mother ever has a newspaper or a magazine. She has never heard of such things. Arab women do not know anything of the many interests and pleasures that occupy the time of women in Christian lands.
WOMEN GRINDING AT THE MILL.
Would you like to know how they make bread in Arabia? First the wheat is sifted and cleaned and then it is put into one of the hand-mills. It consists of an upper and nether millstone with a hole in the upper one and a wooden handle. Two women usually sit and grind because the stone is heavy and they love to talk while they work. One swings it half way and the other pulls it around. Then the coarse flour is taken out and put into a bowl with water and salt and mixed to the right consistency. A piece of this dough is then taken between the hands and gradually beaten until it is about the thickness of a book cover and twelve inches in diameter—a round, flat cake of dough. The oven is usually under ground and is shaped like a large jar with the mouth above the ground a little. A fire is built inside the oven and when the sides of the oven are quite hot the fire is allowed to die out. Then the large pan cakes of bread are deftly clapped on to the side of the oven until the space is covered and one by one the cakes are taken out when done. In some houses they have a shallow oval pan which is placed over an open fire and on this the cakes are baked. The pan is put on the fire upside down, so even here we are again in Topsy-turvy Land. Twenty or thirty of these flat loaves are baked at one time, for a hungry Arab can eat five or six at one meal.