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Updated: May 9, 2025
The husband's relations generally reside in the same house, but each family has its separate household. The elder boys take their meals with their father, but the wife, daughters, and younger boys are not allowed this privilege. Both sexes are extremely fond of tobacco, which they smoke in pipes called hookas. At the conclusion of my visit, I was offered sweetmeats, fruits, raisins, etc.
These halls are generally used as shops and places of business; also as the resort of idlers, who sit upon mats and ottomans, smoking their hookas and watching the bustle in the streets.
Owners and prospective buyers met, chewed betel-nut, smoked their hookas, sipped coffee and tea, and exchanged the tattle of the hour. It was as much an amusement as a business; indeed, it was the oriental idea of a club, and much the same things were discussed.
Mutiny was afoot, rebellion, but it had not yet found a head. The natives wanted a change, something to gossip about during the hot lazy afternoons, over their hookas and coffee. To them reform meant change only, not the alleviation of some of their heavy burdens. The talk of freeing slaves was but talk; slaves were lucrative investments; a man would be a fool to free them.
In the cool of the evening, when the sun has sunk behind the mountains of Afghanistan, and the valleys are filled with a delicious twilight, the elders of the village lead the way to the chenar trees by the water's side, and there, while the men are cleaning their rifles, or smoking their hookas, and the women are making rude ornaments from beads, and cloves, and nuts, the Mullah drones the evening prayer.
Oriental carpets, octagonal tables, such as the one which ornaments the initial letter of this chapter, hookas, incense burners, and cushions furnish the apartment; while the lattice window is an excellent representation of the "Mesherabijeh," or lattice work, with which we are familiar, since so much has been imported by Egyptian travellers.
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