ground, and have before them, projecting into the street, a stone bench,
on which purchasers seat themselves; this is sheltered from the sun by
an awning usually made of mats fastened to high poles. Many of the shops
are only six or seven feet wide in front; the depth is generally from
ten to twelve feet, with a small private room or magazine behind.

There are twenty-seven coffee-shops. Coffee is drunk to excess in the
Hedjaz; it is not uncommon for persons to drink twenty or thirty cups in
one day, and the poorest labourer never takes less than three or four
cups. In a few of the shops may be had keshre, made from the skin of the
bean, which is scarcely inferior in flavour to that made from the bean
itself. One of the shops is frequented by those who smoke the hashysh,
or a preparation of hemp-flowers mixed with tobacco, which produces a
kind of intoxication. Hashysh is still more used in Egypt, especially
among the peasants. [Of the hemp-flowers, they use for this purpose the
small leaves standing round the seed, (called sheranek.) The common
people put a small quantity of them upon the top of the tobacco with
which their pipes are filled. The higher classes eat it in a jelly or
paste (maadjoun) made in the following manner:--a quantity of the
leaves is boiled with butter for several hours, and then put under a
press; the juice so expressed is mixed with honey and other sweet drugs,
and publicly sold in Egypt, where shops are kept for that purpose. The
Hashysh paste is politely termed bast, and those who sell it basty (i.e.
cheerfulness). On the occasion of a festival to celebrate the marriage
of a son of one of the principal grandees at Cairo, when all the
different crafts of the town were represented in a showy procession, the
basty, although exercising a business prohibited and condemned by the
law, was among the most gaudy. Many persons of the first rank use the
bast in some shape or other; it exhilarates the spirits, and raises the
imagination as violently as opium. Some persons also mix the paste with