.275 
TURKISH BATHING. 
then conducts you into a closet, pours the lather of perfumed soap 
upon your head, and withdraws. 
The ancients did more honour to their guests, and treated them in 
a more voluptuous manner. Whilst Telemachus was at tfie court of 
Nestor, the beautiful Polycaster, the handsomest of the daughters of 
the king of Pylos, led the son of Ulysses to the bath, washed him 
with her own hands, and after anointing Jiis body with precious 
oils, covered him with rich habits and a splendid cloak. Pisistratus 
and Telemachus were not worse treated in the palace of Menelaus. 
When they had admired its beauties, they were conducted to basons 
of marble, where a bath was prepared ; beautiful female slaves 
washed them : and, after anointing them with oil, covered them with 
rich tunics and superb pelices. 
The closet to which one is conducted is furnished with a cistern 
and two cocks, one for cold and another for hot water. There you 
wash yourself. Soon after, the servant returns with a depilatory 
pomatum, which in an instant makes the hair fall off the places it 
is applied to. Both men and women make general use of it in 
Egypt. It is composed of a mineral called rusma, which is of a 
deep brown. The Egyptians burn it lightly, knead it with water, 
mixing it with half the quantity of slaked lime. This grayish 
pa^e, applied to the hair, makes it fall off in two or three minutes, 
without giving the slightest pain. After being well washed and puri- 
fied, you are wrapped up in hot linen, and follow the guide through 
the windings that lead to the outer apartment. This insensible 
jtransition from heat to cold prevents one from suft’ering any incon- 
venience from it. On arriving at the estrade, you find a bed prepared 
for you ; and scarcely are you laid down, before a child comes to 
press every part of your body with its delicate fingers, in order to 
dry you thoroughly. You change linen a second time, and the child 
gently grates the callosity of your feet with pumice-stone. He then 
brings you a pipe, and Moka coffee. 
Coming out of a stove where one was surrounded by a hot and 
moist fog, where the sweat issues from every pore, and transported 
into a spacious apartment open to the external air, the breast dilates, 
p,nd one breathes with voluptuousness. Perfectly massed, and as it 
were regenerated, one experiences an universal comfort. The blood 
circulates with freedom, and one feels as if disengaged from an enor- 
mpus weight, together with a suppleness and lightness to which one 
has been hitherto a stranger. A lively sentiment of existence diffuses 
itself to every extremity of the body; whilst it is lost in delicate sensa- 
tions, the soul sympathizing with the delight, enjoys the most agree- 
able ideas. The imagination, wandering over the universe, which it 
embellishes, sees on every side the most enchanting pictures, every 
where the image of happiness. If life be nothing but the succession 
of our ideas, the rapidity with which they then recur to the memory, 
the vigour with which the mind runs over the chain of them, would 
induce a belief that in the two hours of that delicious calm that suc- 
ceeds the bath, one has lived a number of years. 
Such are thebaths, the use of which were so strongly recommended by 
the ancients, and which are still the delight of the Egyptians. It is by 
