dexterous hands. Although no anatomist, he knows every muscle and sinew
whose suppleness gives ease to the body, and so moulds and manipulates
them that we lose the rigidity of our mechanism, and become plastic in his
hands. He turns us upon our face, repeats the same process upon the back,
and leaves us a little longer to lie there passively, glistening in our
own dew.

We are aroused from a reverie about nothing by a dark-brown shape, who
replaces the clogs, puts his arm around our waist and leads us into an
inner hall, with a steaming tank in the centre. Here he slips us off the
brink, and we collapse over head and ears in the fiery fluid.
Once--twice--we dip into the delicious heat, and then are led into a
marble alcove, and seated flat upon the floor. The attendant stands behind
us, and we now perceive that his hands are encased in dark hair-gloves. He
pounces upon an arm, which he rubs until, like a serpent, we slough the
worn-out skin, and resume our infantile smoothness and fairness. No man
can be called clean until he has bathed in the East. Let him walk directly
from his accustomed bath and self-friction with towels, to the Hammam
el-Khyateën, and the attendant will exclaim, as he shakes out his
hair-gloves: "O Frank! it is a long time since you have bathed." The other
arm follows, the back, the breast, the legs, until the work is complete,
and we know precisely how a horse feels after he has been curried.

Now the attendant turns two cocks at the back of the alcove, and holding a
basin alternately under the cold and hot streams, floods us at first with
a fiery dash, that sends a delicious warm shiver through every nerve;
then, with milder applications, lessening the temperature of the water by
semi-tones, until, from the highest key of heat which we can bear, we
glide rapturously down the gamut until we reach the lowest bass of
coolness. The skin has by this time attained an exquisite sensibility, and