Carthage and Tunis Author:Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: There are sundry laws which a Jew ought to observe in his dress, and sundry customs which he does observe a good deal; but the stranger can only tell a Jew from ... more »an Arab because he looks like a Jew. In Tunis one sees the most perfect Oriental city west of Egypt, which is clean enough and safe enough for Europeans to examine with ease and pleasure; and here, until the French occupation a quarter of a century ago, was an Eastern empire like Morocco, but distinguished by the civilisedness and correctness of its rulers, who, forgetting the arrogance of their old Corsair days, sat dreading lest they should share the fate of the rulers of Algiers. The women are far more Oriental than the men. They all adhere to their national costume. A lady hardly ever leaves her house, and in the Medina, the Arab quarter, a man may not go on his house-top, lest he should overlook his neighbour's wife. Not long have the Arab ladies of Tunis been allowed to see a doctor. The highest rank you meet in the streets are the wives of rich tradesmen, splendid patches of Eastern colour, for they wear thick black veils, embroidered with all the colours of a Roman scarf, without eye-holes, over their faces, and they can only see to walk by holding out the bottom in both hands a foot in front of their bodies. As they bear down upon you, like an antique galley with a silkensail, you know that you have entered the Gate of the Orient. They, too, are hedged in by conventions, for they may not stop to shop or talk—a prohibition which they, and even ladies, are beginning to defy, when sale days are on at the Petit Louvre. The city Arab women of the lower class are no less Eastern than their sisters. They dress their whole persons in white, and wind a black scarf round their faces, without holes for eyes or mouth, e...« less