In Siwa there is no lurid night life like that of Cairo, in which novelists revel. The people go early to bed and lights are very little used. Even the quarter of the women of the town is as quiet as the other streets. There are no noisy cafes with music and dancing girls, and no hidden houses where natives smoke hashish and opium. The Senussi religion forbids smoking, or “drinking tobacco,” as it is called, also coffee, which is supposed to be too stimulating for the passions, and for this reason tea is the universal drink. Life is a very leisurely affair, a pleasant monotony, and “Bukra—inshallah!”—to-morrow, if God wills—is the favourite expression. Very few games are played. Chess, which was invented in the East, is unknown, but one sometimes sees a couple of men deeply absorbed in a game called “helga,” which is rather like draughts, played with onions and camel-dung on a board which is marked out in the sand on the ground. The younger men, especially the ones with black blood in their veins, are much addicted to drinking lubki, an inexpensive, intoxicating liquor made from the sap of palm trees. The branches that form the crown of the tree are cut off, leaving the heart of the palm tree bare. A groove is cut from the heart through the thick outer bark, and a jar is hung at the end of this groove which receives the juice when it oozes up from the tree. A palm which has been tapped in this way yields lubki for two or three months, and if the branches are allowed to grow again after some time the tree will continue to bear fruit, but the branches grow very ragged and trees that have been used for lubki acquire a rather drunken-looking appearance which always remains. One of the favourite tricks of small Siwan boys is to climb up the palm trunks and drink the lubki from the jar in which it is being collected by the owner of the garden. When freshly drawn it is as sweet and frothy as ginger-beer, but in a few days it becomes strongly alcoholic and tastes bitter, like sour milk. Labourers working in the gardens always retire to a spring and bathe after the day’s work, then they enjoy a long “sundowner” of lubki before they ride home to the town. All intoxicating drinks are forbidden by the Koran, but in Siwa the people satisfy their consciences by saying that the Prophet approved of all products of the palm tree, so lubki cannot be a forbidden drink.