This half out-of-doors alcove gives access to the rooms which we should think of as being really in the house. Some of these may be even more lavishly decorated than the _liwân_, and all are comfortably furnished—according to the Syrian idea of comfort. Into the apartments of the ladies, however, no male guest may enter. These are _hareem_—“forbidden.” Indeed, it is very likely that they are in a separate building, which opens on an inner court whose existence the casual visitor does not even suspect. No men save her nearest relatives are supposed ever to look upon the unveiled face of a Moslem woman. This prohibition, however, is of necessity little observed among the poor, hard-working peasants and the desert Bedouins; and in the cities the universal characteristics of the female sex have not been entirely obliterated by the law of Islam. An unusually thin gauze almost always reveals a remarkably beautiful face, and I have seen veils coquettishly dropped—of course by accident—even in the bazaars of fanatical Damascus. Yet among the upper classes the thought of social intercourse between the sexes is so repellent that no good Moslem ever willingly alludes to his wife. If he is absolutely forced to speak of her, he apologizes by saying _Ajallak!_—“May God lift you up!”—that is, from the degradation of having to hear such a thing mentioned. He uses the identical expression when he refers to anything else unfit to be spoken of in conversation between gentlemen. “Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God hath gifted the one above the other,” said the Prophet.[35] There is no place for female suffrage in the world of Islam!