The Arab quarters are at their best at midnight. They have their music-halls, blatant and raucous and evil-smelling. The star performers are usually confined to one bloated, painted woman who screams an Arab rhythm at intervals under the influence of hasheesh, to the accompaniment of an orchestra of pipes and drums whose performers are elated by the same familiar spirit. Arab music is strident to a degree that sears the nerves. No drunkenness in the audience ever drowns _that_. It soars like a siren above the frantic mirth of the drinkers. Applause breaks forth at unprovoked intervals. The lady is never perturbed. She is reinforced occasionally by the brazen-throated orchestra, which is chorus too. The din is unimaginable when they are working in concert. The Arab sense of rhythm is unerring. Their rhythms are irregular and without consecutiveness in their habits, to the European ear that is not closely attentive; drawn out, as it were, into irregular strands--totally unsystematised, it seems--with the intervals at cross-purposes. They despise the Western mathematical rhythmical "groups" and the regular Western recurrence of stresses and intervals. English rhythm is as much unlike it as the characters of a London morning sheet differ from the gracefully irregular type of the native Egyptian press; the difference is as striking as between the tortuous Eastern mind and the British downrightness; as between an English tweed suit and the Arab flowing robe. Yet in this rhythmical maze no member of the orchestral chorus ever loses his way. There is perfect agreement in the disclosing of the scheme, which, after half an hour's turbulent listening, begins to show its shape through the rhythmical murk. And you know before you leave that though English music may make a sweeter sound than this, the Arab mastery of rhythm is mastery indeed. And that knowledge is, of course, deepened if you'll stop any day and listen to a group of Arab workmen chanting at their job. So long as you withstand the glad-eye of the serpent of Old Nile (who descends now and then from the boards and collects baksheesh piastres) and keep to coffee, you will find these Egyptian music-halls absorbing enough. There are never women in the audience. The Egyptian woman--at any rate in the lower and middle classes--is never a "theatre-goer," as far as can be judged. She earns most of the living. All the _feloose_ would seem to go into her lord's mighty hand, which does the spending--mostly on himself. Night after night he comes there in his red tarbush and sees the evening out with liquor and vociferous talk. Somewhere in the small-hours a gharry comes for the lady, and the hall noisily gets emptied. And as you climb up to your room in the hotel opposite, you can hear the dispersing throng in argument and criticism far along the emptying street. Standing at your balcony door, it merges imperceptibly into the subdued murmur of the city, broken by a belated wailing, street-cry.