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 beautiful little gazels are started up in the wilderness and go bounding off like thistle-down in a breeze, turning every now and then, however, to look with wonder at the traveler. Once, near eṭ-Ṭayyibeh we saw four together, and once, east of Jeba‛, we saw a herd of nine gazels.

Among the smaller creatures met with are the mole-rat, the big horny-headed lizard, called by the natives ḥirdhôn, the ordinary lizard about the color of the gray-brown rocks among which it speeds, the little green lizard that darts about, and the pallid gecko, climbing on house-walls. The beautiful and odd chameleon must also be mentioned. Snakes are not commonly seen by the traveler. Scorpions, black beetles, mosquitoes, fleas and a diabolical little sand-fly, called by the natives ḥisḥis, are among the less agreeable creatures noticed.

At Haifa, in the house of the Spanish vice-consul, we saw the skin of a crocodile caught in the river Zerḳâ in 1902. They spoke also of one which had been caught fourteen years before in the same waters.