orientalcairocit00sladuoft

276 Oriental Cairo
They smiled courteously, and the attendant of course looked
for his fee and accepted it. Yet I seldom had AH there to
keep me in countenance, for unless he and I were alone he
remained outside to take charge of the ladies.
These visits to the haniviaiii were full of impressions for
the imagination. Everything went on as if no stranger were
present. The beautiful octagonal fountain of the Jiarara
always had a broad marble rim, on which the bather sat about
with nothing more than a waistcloth, and often quite nude,
while the massager cracked his joints and kneaded his flesh
or rasped the soles of his feet. Some people prefered to lie
down on the liwdn while their joints were cracked. I used
to wonder how they survived it ; the massagers used to crack
every joint in the body ; they even used to make the neck
crack twice by twisting the head round first one way and
then the other. Nobody's neck was ever broken while
I was there. But I am sure mine would have been if I had
let them try. That alone would have prevented me from
bathing in a native Jiavimam after I had seen the first. It
seemed so funny to see quite important people having their
ears twisted round until they cracked, by common bath
attendants. Even that did not make me shudder like seeing
patients having their feet rasped. The rasps were made of
clay from Assyut I suppose, in the form of a crocodile or any
other suitable beast ; and those which were used for the feet
of the common people were as rough as a bread-crumb
grater, though those used for the upper classes were finer and
smoother. I supposed that if you trudged about the streets
barefoot your feet did get protuberances that needed a nutmeg-grater
to remove them, but I did not understand how
any foot less solid than a horse's hoof could stand those rough
rasps.
All the bathers in the Jiarara were in a profuse state of
perspiration, and no wonder, for the room was heated with
hot air, and a jet of nearly boiling water was playing from the
Jaskiya, and in one if not two corners of the room there were
smaller rooms containing tanks of the hottest water a human
being could bear, called maghtas, for the bathers to plunge