national crafts?

If you enter the shop of a dealer in Mexican curios and national handicrafts, and glance right and left, observing the native textiles and all the other manufactures that keep the Mexican style, and see the rugs and the pottery and the shapes of the boats, and ponder the patterns, dyes, colors, designs, and tastes before you, you would imagine yourself entering one of the curio shops of Cairo, or a museum among the Pharaonic museums.

Beyond this, I have noticed that the Indians of Mexico, who are the mass of the people, resemble the East not only in what lies between them and the inhabitants of the countryside of Egypt and Iraq, but further still, in the many resemblances between them and the people of the deserts of the other Arab lands.

By coincidence, while writing these words I came upon a letter I had addressed to my wife from Mexico City on April 11, 1939, in which I touched on this subject and said: We would cross long distances and see in them only a few scattered Indians — and they are still a majority in Mexico, perhaps two thirds of the population. As for their dress, it is a white shirt and white trousers, and over their shoulders a striped woolen blanket, most like the rugs of the Bedouin in the lands of Syria — the work of their own hands. They walk with

swords drawn, and sometimes gird on bow and arrows.

Those are the people of the mountains. In the flat country the inhabitants are country folk, most like the settled Bedouin of our lands and the peasants of Egypt: they carry laban on donkeys, and on them and on their own backs they transport their villages' crops and produce to sell in the markets. Often I would see the woman carrying these burdens alone, while her husband walked beside her with the gait of a lord, or walked on ahead of her.

Often I would see the peasant women carrying their children on their backs, wrapped in their

waist-cloths after the fashion of the Bedouin women in our lands, or with threads of fluffed wool thrown over their shoulders, spinning it with the spindle as they walked. As for the houses of these Indians, they are huts of palm fronds roofed with straw, or huts built of fronds resembling banana leaves and roofed with certain plants.

On the men's heads are great broad hats. As for the women, they wrap themselves from the crown of the head to the foot in garments like the izars of the women of the village of Douma in Syria, some striped and some black.

Royal Pudding

The family's favorite dessert

So says Mother

Most mothers prefer Royal Pudding

Royal Puddings

Because it is light and quickly digested,

nourishing and delicious in taste,

easy to prepare and cheap in price

Ready in five minutes

Royal CHOCOLATE FLAVOR PUDDING

7161-E

General agents for Syria and Lebanon

The East Mediterranean Company, Khan Antoun Bey — Beirut