Читать книгу The People of Palestine. An enlarged edition of "The Peasantry of Palestine, Life, Manners and Customs of the Village" онлайн

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The only dreadful wind in Palestine is the east wind,^[27] because it blows from the inland desert and brings excessive heat. The Arabic word for east is sherḳ, and so for east wind the Arab says Sherḳ-îyeh. From this we get, by corruption, our word sirocco (or sherokkoh), which has come to mean simply a hot, enervating blast from any direction. To the Arab it is that wearing east wind whose coming can be felt in the early morning before a breath of air seems stirring. There is a certain chemical effect on the nervous system of those who are particularly sensitive to the blighting touch of the Sherḳîyeh. Sometimes this wind goes away suddenly after a short day, but almost always its coming means that it will run three days at least, and often more. There is a similar wind in Egypt known to residents of Cairo as the Khumsûn (fifty), from the likelihood that it will remain fifty days. Such an unbroken period of hot winds must be exceedingly rare in Palestine, though in the early autumn of 1902 there was an almost continuous Sherḳîyeh for five weeks. The east wind of winter is usually as disagreeably cold as its relative in summer is hot and suffocating. The only good thing that I ever knew the summer sirocco to do was to cure quickly the raisin grapes spread on the ground in September.