Mike Brettel commenced making tea;--they use fine green tea--they put it into the pot with sundry sweet herbs and large lumps of sugar. The teapot was Britannia metal, the cups and saucers the small delicate Chinese. The tray was of a manufacture for which Rabat is celebrated. It is brass chased in arabesques and inlaid in colours. At Mecca they work in the same way. He _rang the bell_ for hot water and sugar, which were brought, the one by the olive maiden already mentioned, the other by one whom I might have taken for her, had her tunic not been white and red. The hot water was brought in a common tin kettle, the sugar in a japanned epaulette box. The two little slaves having discharged their office, returned and stood with crossed arms against the white wall, which cast forth as from the field of a phantasmagoria, their plump, symmetrical and dark limbs. They seemed to have been sent on the part of the female household to do all the work of gazing on the strangers; and if I had to judge by them of those we did not see, Mike Brettel’s Harem, for beauty, originality, and sprightliness, had little to fear from competition, far or near. I was accompanied by the consular agent, his soldier, and a common Jew. After Mr. Leraza and I were seated, the soldier was invited to sit down, and then the Jew: he did so quite familiarly, close to the master of the house, who, with his own hand served him, after the rest, with tea. The room was a cube of fifteen feet; there was one small window, a simple aperture in the white wall in the form of a niche struck through the thickness of the wall, levelled inside; this feature took the apartment out of the common-place. On the floor was spread one of their beautiful mats; on the three sides were mattresses covered with Turkey carpets, and cushions at each end resembling a low Turkish divan. The walls were dead white, broken by richly-ornamented arm-racks. Three long guns on each in their red cloth cases, daggers in massive chased silver scabbards, swords and pouches, were suspended by silk cords with large tassels, blue, red and yellow. The crown of the room was the ceiling: an octagon dome was fitted on to the cube by means of arches in the angles, which will be understood by reference to the Hall of the Ambassadors, in Owen Jones’s Alhambra; but the roof, instead of being in coloured stucco, was in carved and painted wood. There was no gilding or silvering--the effect was worked out entirely from dead colour. I looked at it till my neck was sore and stiff, and I can only describe it by the word arabesque, just as I might say kaleidoscope, and in like manner, interminable: the same elements re-appear in never-ending forms, ever pleasing, ever new, yet always, in so far as description can go, the same. The roof was the statue, the apartment the pedestal: each required the other. The solitary light, the pure white walls, the cubic form, were required to set off the placid beauty of the dome.