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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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.