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A VINEYARD AT RÂM ALLÂH

Summer is the time of fierce heat, and yet through it all the grape-vines keep green and the luscious clusters grow larger and ripen under their heavy armor-plate of leaves. The peasants enjoy the tart taste of green fruit. Half-grown grapes are sometimes eaten with salt on them. Green almonds are eaten in the same way. Often it is hard to get ripe peaches, melons and other fruits because of the tendency of the peasants to pick them before they are ripe. But the time of the ripe grapes is the glad time of the year. Instead of saying “August” the peasants often use the expression “In grapes.” It is a season by itself to them. The vineyard owners build summer booths among the vines and sleep there through the season. In large vineyards it is common to employ a black man, perhaps a Moroccan, as a watcher. The Syrian peasant stands in peculiar awe of the black stranger. The watchers are provided with shotguns, for foxes and dogs like to eat grapes. All fruit must be guarded against thievishly disposed neighbors. One who knows his vineyard watches the progress of the choicest clusters, having covered some of them early to keep them from drying and to allow them to develop unplucked. Should any grapes be stolen he quickly notices the loss. He sets a thin row of fine stones along the top of his wall in such a way that a night marauder must necessarily rattle them down and thus awaken him. One of the heartless bits of meanness that a hostile peasant can perpetrate in order to pay a grudge is to cut the vine stocks of his enemy’s vineyard. Since it takes three years for a new vineyard to bear, such an act is a serious damage.

The finest grapes within reach of Jerusalem are those from Hebron and Râm Allâh. Large white clusters similar to the Malaga grapes are the favorites, though purple grapes are also grown. At Râm Allâh the vines lie flat on the ground. The vine is pruned back to leave three joints on every small branch that is spared in the rigorous treatment.^[41] At Jifnâ the vines may be seen trained on stakes. At Zaḥleh, in the Lebanon, the growers have a way of propping up the main vine a few inches above the ground, so that a vineyard has the look of waves of green. In Jerusalem some of the grapes at the Greek Hospital and at the White Fathers’ near St. Stephen’s Gate are raised on arbors, and the clusters are covered with little bags. Thus protected the grapes ripen slowly and are enjoyed until late in the season. Vast quantities of fresh grapes are consumed as an article of daily food during August, September and October. The price, when cheap, is a cent a pound, and it gradually creeps up to the fancy price of six cents a pound late in the season. Grapes have been provided from the country vineyards as late as the first of December.

Trees need considerable soil, but the grape-vine will thrive with very little and will penetrate with its rootlets all the fissures of the lime-rock for yards about. Then, too, the luscious bunches lying on a pebbled ground do better than those on clear soil. Most of the grass and wild, weedy growth of the country is bulbous and clings in scanty soil, gathering as in a reservoir all the available moisture.

When the crop demands clear ground the native farmer piles the stones into walls, watch-towers or a huge heap in a less fertile spot of the field.^[42] It is often a problem to find room for the waste stones. They may be tossed out into the roads and paths. A stranger says, “I don’t see why these people don’t clear these paths of stone; surely it would pay.” But the farmers prefer stones in the paths to stones in the garden patch. With their bare feet, or on their donkeys, they are able by a lifetime of practise to pick their way over such paths. Moreover, peasants are not nervous in Palestine. Stones always furnish a handy weapon,^[43] or a reminder on the heels of a slow donkey. In going about through the country one often sees piles of little stones set up one on another. Sometimes these little piles are meant for scarecrows; sometimes they are used to mark a boundary; but there is a wider and more constant use for such loosely built little columns. They are set up in sight of holy spots. Apparently they are not only set up in the vicinity of shrines, wilys, etc., but also in places whence a distant view may be had of some holy place, as Jerusalem, which the natives call “el-Ḳuds esh-Sharîf” (The Noble Holy) or, for short, el-Ḳuds, which is practically equivalent to our expression “The Holy City.”^[44] These little columnar piles may also be met in sight of the hill or mount called Neby Samwîl, which we usually identify with the Mizpeh of Samuel.^[45]

RÂM ALLÂH MAN AND A BASKET OF OLIVES

STRETCH OF OLIVE TREES ON ROAD TO AYN SÎNYÂ

The terrace is a thing of great utility to the hill farmer of Palestine. To the traveler it is a thing of beauty as it climbs the hills with its artistically irregular breaks in what would be otherwise a rather monotonous slope. But with terraces and some water the earth is caught and filled with many possibilities of fruit and vegetables. A hill well terraced and well watered looks like a hanging garden. Much of the farming in Judea is on the sides of hills. The little iron-shod wooden plow is run scratching along the terraces. Sometimes one of the oxen will be on a lower level than the other. To go forward without slipping down the hillside is not easy. What cannot be plowed is dug up with the pickax, and wheat or barley will find lodgment in every pocket of soil. As all the reaping is done by hand it offers no especial difficulty, and the monotony of which some people complain on prairie land is never experienced on such a pitched-roof farm. Even where the made terrace is allowed to decay there are many natural terraces where the horizontal layers outcrop from the hillsides. Were the country well kept up, all these terraces would be guarded artificially, for in time a natural terrace loses its protecting edge and the soil and rain come down cascading over the hill stairs until the bed of the stream is reached.

Of food trees the olive is probably the most valuable. It takes ten or fifteen years to bring it to the state of bearing much fruit, but it may go on bearing heavy crops for a century. The oil is freely used in cooking, for salads, for lighting and for anointing. A hard-pressed peasant will occasionally yield to the temptation to cut down some of his olive-trees, selling the finest pieces of wood to the makers of the olive-wood articles^[46] which are prized by tourists, and disposing of the rest as fire-wood.^[47] A hundredweight of such fire-wood sells for from twelve to twenty-five cents, according to the season and the market, the city price being considerably higher than the country price. A good olive-orchard is a sure source of income, unless the taxes are too harshly and arbitrarily imposed. The cutting them down is a real calamity to the country, but it is done only too frequently in a poor year to avoid taxes. The trunk of an aged olive-tree attains a great girth and a gnarled, knobby look. Sometimes a large part of one of these huge trunks will be quite hollowed out by decay, in which case the peasants often fill up the cavities with a core of stones. The tree goes on bearing with chief dependence on the state of the bark for its healthy condition. The heavy crops and light crops follow each other in somewhat the same relation as the apple crops in our New England country. Women and children gather up those olive berries that fall to the ground early in the season. Whenever it is desired to gather the crop of a tree or orchard the men beat the branches with very long light poles and the women and the children pick up the fallen fruit from the ground. Of course this is a poor way to gather the best olives, but inasmuch as the chief use of the olive in Palestine is to express the oil, it makes less difference. The berries do not ordinarily grow to the larger sizes so often seen in our markets. Perhaps one of the very handsomest stretches of olive-orchards in the East is at what is called the Ṣaḥrâ, near Beirut, between that city and Shwayfât. Other smaller but excellent orchards are to be seen between Bethlehem and Bayt Jâlâ, at Mâr Elyâs, Bîr ez-Zayt and to the south of eṭ-Ṭayyibeh.

The fig in Judea ripens in August and its fruit may be had for several months, as new fruit keeps maturing. There are several varieties of this valuable tree. A few ripe figs are often found as early as June and are luxuries.^[48] The natives sometimes hasten the ripening of a few early figs by touching the ends with honey. The natives declare that the fig-tree will not thrive near houses but will become wormy. The action of the milk of fig branches and leaves on the tissues of the eyes, lips and mouth is very disagreeable, sometimes making them very sore. The eyes of children in the fig season are often very repulsive. For this reason the people prefer other shade, if obtainable, than that of fig-trees. Most fig-trees are small, about the size of an ordinary plum-tree, but the large green varieties may grow to a considerable size. When small fig-trees have sent up two pliable trunk-shoots these are usually twisted together to strengthen each other. They look like a suggestion of that ugly taste in architecture that delighted in twisted columns. The appearance of the branches of a leafless fig-tree is not unlike that of the horse-chestnut in winter time. Large quantities of the black figs and some of the white figs are dried in the orchards, being spread out on the ground under the strong sun-rays.

The pomegranate-tree looks more like an unkempt shrub. The beautiful red bell-like blossoms are very attractive. Lemons and oranges grown for profit are often small trees. The sour marmalade orange grows into a larger, statelier tree.

At Urṭâs, near Solomon’s Pools, the largest and most beautifully colored apricots grow. Peaches, plums, quinces and almonds are plentiful, and the cherry, mulberry and walnut thrive.

Concerning trees about the shrines and wilys and all the so-called sacred trees there will be a more appropriate place to speak later on.

In a land where fruit grows and flourishes one may have far less fruit than in some fruitless city in a colder climate but favored with ample facilities for transportation. Right here within a few miles of the finest orange groves in the land, near the vineyards, under the olive and fig-trees, with peaches, pomegranates, apricots and plums, we probably find shorter seasons for each than is the case in some Anglo-Saxon city of the middle temperatures. Here fruit will be much cheaper while it lasts, and some fruits, which must be found near the trees, if enjoyed at all, such as the fig, will be available nowhere else as here. The peach, plum, orange, apricot and grape go to the London, Liverpool, New York, Chicago and Boston markets from the place producing the earliest crops, and the trains and steamships continue bringing from various markets as the season shifts from one garden spot to another. But right here, under this particular orange-tree or by this grape-vine, we usually wait for the ripening of the local crop, knowing that lack of carrying facilities forbids us eating from a tree that yields earlier fruit some hundred miles away, or from a tree that yields when our tree is bare. And so while people who never saw an orange-tree may buy oranges ten months in the year, we who have an orange-tree in sight may have to be content with the orange season of our district. But they will be cheap while they last. Fifty cents is a very ordinary price for a hundred of the best oranges, and one dollar a hundred is pretty dear.

The large raised map of Palestine in fibrous plaster, over seven feet by four, published by the Palestine Exploration Fund, London, and the smaller one help in the study of the physical features of the country.

An excellent small Relief Map of Palestine is edited by Ernest D. Burton and published by the Atlas Relief Map Co., Chicago.

READING LIST

 Wilson, C. T.: “Peasant Life in the Holy Land.” (Dutton.)

 Van Lennep: “Bible Lands.”Lands.” (Harper, 1875.)

 Smith, G. A.: “Historical Geography of the Holy Land.”

 Huntington, Ellsworth: “Palestine and Its Transformation.”

 The Annual of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, 1919–20.

 Bell, Gertrude L.: “The Desert and the Sown.”

 See Arts. on Crocodiles in the Pal. Expl. Fund Quarterly, 1920 (p. 167), 1921 (p. 19). (Gray and Masterman.)

 Stereoscopic Views of Palestine by Underwood and Underwood, and lantern slides sold by the Palestine Exploration Fund.

(The statement on page 13, line 20, needs change in the light of recent history.)

A BEDAWY HOUSE

BEDAWY DRINKING

1. Hosea 13: 3.

2. 1 Kings 17: 7; Job 6: 15, 17.

3. Psalm 104: 10.

4. 1 Kings 18: 4; 19: 9, 13; Judges 6: 2.

5. 1 Sam. 13: 5, 6; 14: 11, 22.

6. Judges 13–15.

7. Isa. 35: 7; 41: 18; 42: 15.

8. Cf. Joshua 15: 19.

9. Song 4: 2; 6: 6.

10. John 4: 6.

11. Cf. Eccles. 2: 6.

12. John 9: 7.

13. 2 Kings 20: 20.

14. Gen. 8: 22.

15. Song 2: 11.

16. 2 Sam. 23: 4.

17. 2 Sam. 23: 20.

18. Matt. 24: 20; Mark 13: 18.

19. Cf. 1 Kings 18: 43–45.

20. Cf. Prov. 26: 1.

21. Cf. Deut. 11: 14; Job 29: 23; Prov. 16: 15; Jer. 3: 3; 5: 24; Hosea 6: 3; Joel 2: 23; Zech. 10: 1; James 5: 7.

22. Amos 4: 7.

23. Cf. Psalm 65: 9–13.

24. Jer. 8: 20.

25. Gen. 30: 14.

26. Song 7: 13.

27. Jer. 18: 17; Ezek. 17: 10; 19: 12; Hosea 13: 15; Jonah 4: 8.

28. Prov. 25: 23.

29. Psalm 129: 6.

30. Isa. 32: 2.

31. Song 2: 12.

32. Song 2: 15.

33. Matt. 5: 14.

34. Isa. 5: 2.

35. Num. 22: 24.

36. Jer. 6: 16.

37. Psalm 107: 4–7.

38. Ezek. 34: 14.

39. Isa. 33: 12.

40. Jer. 4: 3; Hosea 10: 12.

41. Cf. John 15.

42. Isa. 5: 2.

43. 1 Sam. 30: 6; 1 Kings 12: 18; 2 Kings 3: 25; cf. Matt. 23: 37; John 8: 59; 10: 31.

44. Cf. Matt. 4: 5; 27: 53.

45. 1 Sam. 7: 5.

46. 1 Kings 6: 23, 31–33.

47. Matt. 7: 19.

48. Isa. 28: 4.