For, apart from the field of war and the strife of faction, Moslem life was idle and inactive. There was nothing to relieve its sanctimonious voluptuousness. The hours not spent in the harem were divided between listless conversation in the city knots and clubs, and formal prayers in the Mosque five times a day. Ladies no longer appeared in public excepting as they flitted along shrouded beneath ‘the veil.’ The light and grace, the charm and delicacy, which their presence imparted to Arab society before Islam, was gone. The soft warm colouring of nature, so beautifully portrayed in ancient Arabian song, was chilled and overcast. Games of chance, and such like amusements, common to mankind, were forbidden by law as stigmatised in the Corân; even speculation was checked by the ban put upon interest for money lent. And so, Mussulman life, cut off, beyond the threshold of the harem, from the ameliorating influences of the gentler sex, began to assume that dreary, morose, and cheerless aspect which it has ever since retained.[413] But nature is not thus to be pent up and trifled with; the rebound must come; and with the rebound, humanity, in casting off its shackles, burst likewise through the barriers of the Faith. The gay youth of Islam, cloyed with the dull delights of the sequestered harem, were tempted when they went abroad to evade the restrictions of their creed, and to seek in the cup, in music, games, and dissipation the excitement which the young and the light-hearted will demand. In the greater cities, intemperance and libertinism were rife. The canker spread, oftentimes the worse because concealed. The more serious classes of believers were scandalised not only by amusements, luxuries, and voluptuous living, held to be inconsistent with their creed, but with immoralities of a kind which may not even be named. The development of this evil came later on, but the tares were already being sown even under the strict and puritanical Caliphate of Omar.[414] [Sidenote: Simplicity of Omar’s domestic life.]