Semna is a kind of cheese made from goat’s milk. In the morning the sheep and goats are milked into wooden bowls, the milk is poured into a water-skin and rolled vigorously up and down by two women seated on the ground till it thickens into a sort of butter. The addition of a certain herb is needed if it is to be made into cheese. One kind of white butter made by the Arabs is very good and forms an excellent substitute for real butter, and a change from the tinned species. Arabs are very free in their conversation, and personal remarks are not considered to be ill-mannered. They usually ask one’s age, and inquire whether people are married or not. The idea of a man being over twenty and still unmarried surprises them enormously; they think that he can’t afford to buy a wife. They always show a keen interest in what they consider the peculiar habits of Europeans. Hardly any of them can read or write, and very few have ever been off the desert. When a bedouin gets to Alexandria he is like a countryman in London. The bedouin are superstitious, but not as intensely so as the oasis dwellers. In every tent one notices a little bundle of charms hung on one of the tent poles to avert the Evil Eye. One such collection would consist of a black cock’s leg, a red rag, a dried frog, two bones, and a little leather charm, tied together and hung on the pole. One day I was sitting talking to some Arabs in a tent when suddenly I realized that everybody was staring in a fascinated way at my mouth. I wondered what was the matter. Then I heard the women whispering to themselves: “He must be a very wealthy one; see how he adorns himself with gold.” I couldn’t imagine what they meant as I was only wearing a shirt, shorts and stockings, nothing very remarkable in the way of clothes. Then I heard something about “Gold tooth,” and I realized that their attention had been caught by a hideous gold crown that had been put over one of my front teeth in a great hurry just before I left Cairo the last time I was on leave. They thought it a most attractive and novel form of decoration.