orientalcairocit00sladuoft

15^ Oriental Cairo
in the middle over the shop there is a sort of street corner
over it with windows looking both ways. As the women pass
most of their time indoors they spend an inordinate time at
their windows, grated with inesJirebiya like those of better-off
people. By having this succession of angles the occupant of
each raba can look up and down the street. Streets of rabas
are nearly the ugliest things in the world, but to their inhabit-
ants they present the same, attractions as the oriel'd palaces
of the mamelukes.
One thing they do miss, not having a wooden lock to their
door. The Egyptian woman loves the idiotic wooden lock of
her ancestress in the days of the Pharaohs, and she loves to
carry about with her a wooden key almost as long as her
baby. It may be literally nearly a foot long, and two inches
wide, with a few iron pins like the nails round which piano
strings are strained, stuck in one end. When this is put into
the lock, the pins which keep the wooden bolt in its place
are raised, and it can be drawn back. The lock consists
practically of the bolt and a transverse piece of wood, which
makes it look like a Chinese puzzle in the form of a cross.
The wooden bolt of a street door lock is about fourteen
inches long ; rooms and cupboards have small ones, not
more than seven or eight or nine inches long, but the lock
of the door which closes the courtyard will be more likely
two feet long, and if it is a very fine house or a public building
it may be any length. Lane remarks that it is not difficult
to pick this kind of lock—it is a fatuous survival of the Middle
Ages.