Neither did the people of a house forget to find or to make hiding places in the walls or floors of their home, where they could secrete their household treasures--such as nuggets of gold and silver, precious stones, and jewellery for men and women--from thieves and tax-collectors alike.
Wherever the upper floors still remain standing, they reproduce the ground- floor plan with scarcely any differences.

These upper rooms were reached by an outside staircase, steep and narrow, and divided at short intervals by small square landings.

The rooms were oblong, and were lighted only from the doorway; when it was decided to open windows on the street, they were mere air-holes near the ceiling, pierced without regularity or symmetry, fitted with a lattice of wooden cross bars, and secured by wooden shutters.
The floors were bricked or paved, or consisted still more frequently of merely a layer of rammed earth.

The rooms were not left undecorated; the mud-plaster of the walls, generally in its native grey, although whitewashed in some cases, was painted with red or yellow, and ornamented with drawings of interior and exterior views of a house, and of household vessels and eatables (fig.

10).