The usual dress of the males of Tajourah was the fotah, or waist-cloth, and the sarree, which is an Indian term for part of a woman’s dress, exactly corresponding to it in use and shape. It is a long robe, worn round the body, generally of white calico, with a red or blue border at the two extremities; it is usually among the townspeople seven cubits long—that is, seven times the length of the hand and arm from the elbow. Among the Bedouins—the people inhabiting the country—it is but three and a-half, or about the same size as a Scotch plaid, which I noticed one day, as I saw the two distinct and yet similar formed garments drying together upon the ground after a shower of rain. The ladies wear a long blue chemise with short sleeves, and a very heavy necklace, made of beads, shells, or of large carved pieces of mother of pearl, reposes upon their delicate bosoms. Ear-rings are a very extraordinary vanity amongst them. They consist of large loops of twisted brass wire, five or six in number, placed each through its own perforation in the outer lobe of the ear; whilst depending from each of these is one, sometimes two oblong plates of tin, or pewter, at least an inch broad, and one and a-half inch in length. Bracelets and anklets of brass and pewter, large and heavy, were very common among them; and as they chanted their monotonous songs of prayer or grief, they clattered them against each other as a kind of accompaniment to their voices. They dressed their hair in a number of small plaits, which were connected round the back of the head by parallel bands of red or white cotton, interwoven with and crossing the hair transversely, and in this manner forming a kind of tippet upon the neck and shoulders. I was once a witness to the difficulty of unravelling or combing out this intangled mass, which reminded me of the hair of Samson, interwoven with the web of the loom. The lady whose hair was to be operated upon sat upon a stone in the court, beneath one of our windows, and behind her, on her knees, was a stout hale slave girl, who held in both hands a long-handled wooden fork-like comb, having four very strong prongs, which she dragged through the woolly, greasy, and black hair of her mistress with the force of a groom currying a horse’s tail.