QUEER EXPERIENCES

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 July 1931, Page 12

QUEER EXPERIENCES

OTHER PEOPLE’S BATH NIGHTS

Old Dorchester House had three baths; new Dorchester Hotel has three hundred. People talk of this age of science, machinery and big business. They never talk of this age of baths, writes a correspondent in a London journal. I remember asking for a bath at a small hostel at Dinon, in Brittany. The bath was permanently occupied, apologised the proprietor. On investigation I found it full of earth, ir. which were growing hothouse plants. The host of a wayside inn in Italy was more accommodating. He said I might bath in the big stone trough of his pump in the backyard, where the horses were watered. Next day he proudly supplied me with a beer cask of hot water.

At tho house of a wealthy Mohammedan in Cairo I enjoyed the most luxurious bath of my life. The bathroom consisted lof four domed apartments, the walls and ceilings richly coloured, with ancient Arabic scenes.

In the first room a servant helped mo out of my clothes. In the second tho heat was so awful that I immediately made tracks for the third. Here two square tanks were let into the tiled floor, one holding hot water and the other cold.

Finally, in the fourth room, I found soft silken cushions and couches on which 1 reclined at peace, smoking a long-stemmed hubblebubble pipe. It was in an Indian bungalow that I had my next novel bath. The bathroom was a bare apartment with cement floor. The floor sloped slightly toward the far wall, at the foot of which was an opening covered with wire netting, through which the water ran by a pipe into the garden. In the midst of my ablutions came a sharp hiss from the drain. An angry cobra, awakened from its sleep in the pipe by the running water, was forcing its way through a loose corner of the wire. Horrified, I rushed wildly into the hall shouting for a stick.

When I was living in Pekin bathing in winter was far from a joke. The atmosphere was piercingly cold, thick snow often covered the ground, and a biting wind swept the open 'courtyard at the far end of which stood the bath-house. The bath was made of stone, and however hot the water its walls were always .like, ice. I was once the guest of a Japanese household. At the family bathing hour a large wooden tub of- hot water was placed in the middle of an open court. As the honoured guest my turn came first, but I excused myself by saying I had already bathed. The whole family then climbed in and out of the bath one after another.