shops have been serving coffee, tobacco, and
sweetmeats to their customers for centuries.

[Illustration: AN ARABIAN COFFEE HOUSE]

For a faithful description of the ancient coffee ceremony of the Arabs,
which, with slight modification, is still observed in Arabian homes, we
turn to Palgrave. First he describes the dwelling and then the ceremony:

The K'hawah was a large oblong hall, about twenty feet in
height, fifty in length, and sixteen, or thereabouts, in breadth;
the walls were coloured in a rudely decorative manner with brown
and white wash, and sunk here and there into small triangular
recesses, destined to the reception of books, though of these
Ghafil at least had no over-abundance, lamps, and other such like
objects. The roof of timber, and flat; the floor was strewed with
fine clean sand, and garnished all round alongside of the walls
with long strips of carpet, upon which cushions, covered with faded
silk, were disposed at suitable intervals. In poorer houses felt
rugs usually take the place of carpets.

In one corner, namely, that furthest removed from the door, stood a
small fireplace, or, to speak more exactly, furnace, formed of a
large square block of granite, or some other hard stone, about
twenty inches each way; this is hollowed inwardly into a deep
funnel, open above, and communicating below with a small horizontal
tube or pipe-hole, through which the air passes, bellows-driven, to
the lighted charcoal piled up on a grating about half-way inside
the cone. In this manner the fuel is soon brought to a white heat,
and the water in the coffee-pot placed upon the funnel's mouth is
readily brought to boil. The system of coffee furnaces is universal
in Djowf and Djebel Shomer, but in Nejed itself, and indeed in
whatever other yet more distant regions of Arabia I visited to the
south and east, the furnace is replaced by an open fireplace
hollowed in the ground floor, with a raised stone border, and
dog-irons for the fuel, and so forth, like what may be yet seen in
Spain. This diversity of arrangement, so far as Arabia is
concerned, is due to the greater abundance of firewood in the
south, whereby the inhabitants are enabled to light up on a larger
scale; whereas throughout the Djowf and Djebel Shomer wood is very
scarce, and the only fuel at hand is