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 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.