The carpenters of Arabia, like the boat builders, work in a very old-fashioned way.  But they are much less skillful in their work.  You often see well-built boats but never a well-made door or a window that shuts properly.  Perhaps the fault is with their tools and perhaps they are not as skillful as they once were in using them.

The Arab carpenter uses no bench or vise; he squats upon the ground in the shade of some old building or tree and carries all his tools in a small basket with him.  He has four hands instead of the two hands of an American carpenter, for his feet are bare and he can work as well with his toes as you can with your fingers.  It is wonderful to see how an Arab carpenter can hold a board with his toes while his hands are busy sawing or planing it!

I never see one of these carpenters using his toes so cleverly without thinking that we who wear shoes and stockings and only use our feet for walking have lost one of the powers that the Arabs still possess.  A carpenter’s handsome handiwork in Arabia should be called his toesome toey-work; don’t you think so?  In the picture at the end of this chapter you see an Arab carpenter’s tools.  His saw is exactly opposite to an ordinary saw as the teeth all point the wrong way!  But you know he pulls the tool so it is all right.  The plane has four handles instead of one.  The gimlet is like ours but instead of a brace and bit to make holes, the Arab uses a fiddle-string stretched on a bow which he twists once or twice around his borer, or auger-bit.  Then he fiddles away until he has made a hole.

[Illustration:  SAWING A BEAM.]

It is very strange to see two Arab carpenters sawing a beam as you find them in the picture.

Time is not valuable in the East because the days are long and life is easy and the people are never in a hurry.  Never do anything to-day that can be done to-morrow is their motto.  So they spend a half hour in fixing the beam on a tripod; then they pull and push and push and pull the great clumsy saw blade up and down and in an hour or so the beam is cut in two.  What would such carpenters say if they were to visit an American sawmill and see the gang-saw cut six boards out of a log at once just as easy as your mother cuts a cheese?  Arabia and its carpenters are very far behind us in civilisation.  The whole country is in need of schools and industrial missions so that the Arab boys may learn to handle tools and make furniture and build houses.

[Illustration:  AN ARAB CARPENTER’S TOOLS.]

In America there is hardly a boy living but he can drive a nail and saw off a board and put up a shelf.  In Arabia only carpenters’ sons can do these things; the ordinary boy does not even know how to use a jack-knife; he never had one.  A short definition of Arabia would be “a land without tools.”  Ritter, the great geographer, calls Arabia “the anti-industrial centre of the world,” which is only the same definition in other words.