Lady Mary Wortley Montagu also illustrates the extravagant decoration and expenditure that were bestowed upon some of the private baths even in Turkey, an extravagance that calls to mind the baths of Rome. Speaking of a bath she visited at Calcedonia, she observes:--"The baths, fountains, and pavements are all of white marble, the roofs gilt, and the walls covered with Japan china. Adjoining to them are two rooms, the uppermost of which is divided into a sofa, and in the four corners are falls of water from the very roof, from shell to shell, of white marble, to the lower end of the room, where it falls into a large basin surrounded with pipes that throw up the water as high as the roof. The walls are in the nature of lattices; and on the outside of them there are vines and woodbines planted that form a sort of green tapestry, and give an agreeable obscurity to those delightful chambers." THE EGYPTIAN BATH is an offshoot of the Turkish bath; and the process, although somewhat different, preserves the general characteristics of its parent. Bayle St. John, in his "Village Life in Egypt,"[10] gives us the following sketch of the Egyptian Bath:-- [10] 1852. "We went to the bath to be sweated and scraped, and rubbed and lathered and soused, in company with the respectabilities of Siout--brown-skinned, hairy, rotund gentlemen, who submitted to the operation with a gravity and sedateness at once admirable and ludicrous. Our presence, perhaps, put them upon stilts; but it was evident that, as they lay like porpoises about the slushed benches, enjoying a gentle titillation from the horny palm of the bath servant, or submitting head, back, and breast to the cunning razor, they felt what important people they were--citizens of a place which possessed a real bath, with _hararah_, _faskiyeh_, and, above all, a scalding _makhtas_--the summum bonum of the Egyptian bather; for not all the race of Pharaoh bathe, as not all Frenchmen go to cafés, nor all Englishmen to clubs. From Cairo to Siout we had not found one of these luxurious establishments. In the antechamber, whilst we were being kneaded as if for dough by a coaxing lawingee, one old gentleman, who had doubtless been soaking for hours, came and sat down, wrapped in a sheet, opposite to us."