There is one festival in Siwa which almost corresponds to our Christmas Day. It takes place in the winter, on the tenth day of the month of January. For several days before Yom el Ashur—the tenth day—the roofs of all the houses where there are children are decorated with palm branches, 10 or 20 feet long, with a torch soaked in oil fastened to each branch. After dark, on the eve of the day, all the children go up on to the roofs and set light to the torches. There is a blaze of illumination along the walls, and for a few minutes the whole town is lit by the flaming torches. It is a strange and beautiful sight, quite as effective as the most elaborate illuminations. The children on each roof sing songs to each other, and the wail of their voices sounds far on into the night in a monotonous sweet refrain. On the following day the children visit each other and exchange presents which are very like “Christmas-trees.” Each child makes a square framework of palm branches a few feet long, the white wood is stained and dyed with coloured patterns, and on it are hung fruits, nuts and sweets. Some of the richer children give each other doves and rabbits, but generally they keep to sweets, the most favourite kind being pink and white sugared almonds which are imported by the merchants from Cairo. The children of Siwa look forward to Yom el Ashur with as much pleasure as their parents do to the annual mulids. It is really a very attractive sight to see these little Siwans, very clean and in fresh white clothes for the occasion, trooping solemnly along the streets on their way to visit their friends, while their papas sit outside their houses and chuckle at them, and the mammas watch them proudly from an upstairs window. [Illustration: A LITTLE SIWAN GIRL] CHAPTER VII “FANTASIAS” “A very merry, dancing, drinking, Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.” “I hear the women singing, and the throbbing of the drum, And when the song is failing, or the drums a moment mute, The weirdly wistful wailing, of the melancholy flute.” SIWANS, on the whole, do not take life very seriously, and when they have an excuse for an entertainment they thoroughly let themselves go and are glad of an occasion, if they can afford it, for a terrific gastronomic display, at which an Englishman feels like a canary feeding among hungry ostriches. The poor people eat twice a day, in the morning and evening; the meal consists mainly of dates washed down by lubki and a few drops of tea. They are very sociable, fond of talk, of entertaining their friends and holding “fantasias,” but one notices very much the entire absence of communion between sexes. Men hardly ever speak to women in public, and it would be considered quite a scandal for anyone to be seen in company with his own wife, almost worse than if he was seen speaking to the wife of another man.