work but the Bedouin women and the poor have to do all the toil and never
get a rest. Rich and poor are alike in not having any intellectual
pleasures. Few can read and even those who can read, are able to read only
the Koran and the Moslem traditions. The children have no primers or
picture-books, and no Arab mother ever has a newspaper or a magazine. She
has never heard of such things. Arab women do not know anything of the
many interests and pleasures that occupy the time of women in Christian
lands.

[Illustration: WOMEN GRINDING AT THE MILL.]

Would you like to know how they make bread in Arabia? First the wheat is
sifted and cleaned and then it is put into one of the hand-mills. It
consists of an upper and nether millstone with a hole in the upper one and
a wooden handle. Two women usually sit and grind because the stone is
heavy and they love to talk while they work. One swings it half way and
the other pulls it around. Then the coarse flour is taken out and put into
a bowl with water and salt and mixed to the right consistency. A piece
of this dough is then taken between the hands and gradually beaten until
it is about the thickness of a book cover and twelve inches in diameter--a
round, flat cake of dough. The oven is usually under ground and is shaped
like a large jar with the mouth above the ground a little. A fire is built
_inside_ the oven and when the sides of the oven are quite hot the fire is
allowed to die out. Then the large pan cakes of bread are deftly clapped
on to the side of the oven until the space is covered and one by one the
cakes are taken out when done. In some houses they have a shallow oval pan
which is placed over an open fire and on this the cakes are baked. The pan
is put on the fire upside down, so even here we are again in Topsy-turvy
Land. Twenty or thirty of these flat loaves are baked at one time, for a
hungry Arab can eat five or six at one meal.