sitting in one of these high rooms looking out over the feathery palm trees and watching the colours change as the sun sank behind the mountains, gossiping to some old sheikh, puffing a cigarette, and drinking little cups of sweet, green tea. [Illustration: THE WESTERN QUARTER FROM AN EASTERN ROOF] In summer-time the people sleep on the flat roofs of their houses, which for that reason are surrounded by low mud walls to ensure privacy from the neighbours. They lie on the roofs, men, women and children, always with their faces covered from the moon, because they say moonlight on sleeping faces causes madness. In the daytime the women gossip on the housetops and carry on intrigues, for there is nothing easier than hopping over the walls from one roof to the other, and it is not considered _comme il faut_ for husbands to frequent the roofs in daytime. Often when I climbed up to the citadel and looked down over the town I saw a group of girls sitting on the roofs, generally singing and dressing each other’s hair. When they caught sight of an intruder watching them from above they bolted down the steep stairs like rabbits to their burrows. One sees real rabbits, too. Almost all the natives breed them, and for safety’s sake they are kept on the housetops. One of the features of Siwa town are the “Dululas,” or sun shelters. They consist of spaces shaded from the sun by a roof of rushes and mud, supported by mud pillars. Often in the centre there is a stone basin containing water, which is kept always full at the expense of one of the sheikhs in memory of a deceased relation. Here the greybeards of the town assemble in the evenings, strangers sit and gossip when they visit the town, and the Camel Corps men wander through to hear the latest news. It is a sort of public club, and one hears even more gossip than at a club at home. The largest of these sun shelters has become a little market, and a few decrepit old men spread out their wares in its shade—a few baskets, a dozen onions, an old silk, tattered waistcoat and some red pepper would be the stock-in-trade of one of these hawkers. What they say in the “suk” corresponds to the “bazaar talk” in India, and it is incredible how soon the most secret facts are known there. The Siwans are a distinct race quite apart from the Arabs of the Western Desert, but in appearance they differ very slightly from their bedouin neighbours. Owing to their isolated dwelling-place they have retained their original language, which appears to be an aboriginal Berber dialect. They are unquestionably the remnants of an aboriginal people of Berber stock, but constant intermarriage with outsiders has obliterated any universal feature in their appearance, and through intermarriage with Sudanese they have acquired a darker complexion and in some few cases negroid features. On the whole one does not see the Arab type, or the Fellah, or the Coptic type among the Siwans.