In Arabia the date palms of El Medinah are celebrated above all others for the excellence of their fruit, which were the favourite food of the Prophet—a circumstance investing them in the eyes of all true believers with a certain degree of sanctity. Their stately columnar stems here seem higher than in other lands, and their lower fronds, which in Egypt are lopped off about Christmas time to increase the flavour of the fruit, are allowed to remain unmutilated. One of the reasons for the excellence of Medinah dates is the quantity of water they obtain. Each garden or field has its well; and, even in the hottest weather, the water-wheel floods the soil every third day. The date-tree can live in dry and barren spots; but it loves the beds of streams, and places where moisture is procurable. Books enumerate 139 varieties of date trees. Of these between sixty and seventy are well known, and each is distinguished as usual, among Arabs, by its peculiar name.
The best kind, El Shelebi, is packed in skins or in flat round boxes covered with paper, and sent as gifts to the remotest parts of the Moslem world, for the pilgrim to the Holy Cities would be badly received by the women of his family if he did not present them on his return with a few boxes of this fruit. Imagination has also done its best to invest the better kinds of dates with a legendary interest. Thus, the Ajwah is eaten but not sold, because a tradition of the Prophet declares that whoso breaketh his fast every day with six or seven of the Ajwah date need fear neither poison nor magic. The third kind, El Hilwah, also a large date, derives its name from its exceeding sweetness. Of this tree the Moslems relate that the Prophet planted a stone, which in a few minutes grew up and bore fruit. The Wahski on one occasion bent its head and salaamed to Mahomet as he ate its fruit, for which reason even now its lofty tuft turns earthwards. The Sayhani is so called because, when the founder of El Islam, holding Ali’s hand, happened to pass beneath it, it cried, ‘This is Mahomet the Prince of the Prophets, and this is Ali the Prince of the Pious.’ Of course the descendants of this intelligent tree hold a high rank in the kingdom of palms.
The citizens of Medinah delight in speaking of dates as an Irishman does of potatoes—with a kind of familiar fondness: they eat them for medicine as well as food. The fruit is ripe about the middle of May, and the gathering of it forms the Arab’s vintage. The people make merry the more readily because their favourite fruit is liable to a variety of accidents; droughts injure the tree, locusts destroy the produce, and thus the date crop, like most productions which men are imprudent enough to adopt singly as the staff of life, is subject to failure.
OIL PALM.
Towards the equator the date-tree disappears, while the Doum (Hyphæne thebaica), distinguished from most other palms by its branching trunk, each branch being surmounted by a tuft of large stiff flabelliform leaves, assumes a conspicuous place in the landscape. Its fruits, which are of the size of a small apple, and covered with a tough yellow lustrous rind, have a sugary taste, and serve for the preparation of sherbet. The old leaf-stalks with their thorns and sheathes, which remain attached to the trunk, render the task of climbing it next to impossible. The chief seat of this beautiful palm are the banks of the Nile, in the region of the cataracts. In Kordofan the Delebl palms form large clumps with tamarinds, cassias, adansonias, and various mimosas. Straight as an arrow and perfectly smooth-rinded, this magnificent tree rises to the height of a hundred feet, bearing large fan-like leaves, attached to foot-stalks ten feet long, and armed with mighty thorns. From ten to twenty large bunches of nuts, as big as a man’s head, hang beneath the fronds, but unfortunately these fine-looking fruits disappoint the taste.
Thus various forms of palms flourish along the banks of the Nile, but in general Africa has a smaller variety of these trees to boast of than either Asia or America. On the other hand, the forests of Brazil have no palms at all comparable in commercial importance to the Cocos butyracea and the Elæis gumeensis, the oil-teeming fruit trees of tropical West Africa. The productiveness of the Elæis may be inferred from its bearing clusters of from 600 to 800 nuts, larger than a pigeon’s egg, and so full of oil that it may be pressed out with the fingers. As long as the slave trade reigned along the coast of Guinea, these vegetable treasures remained unnoticed; but since England began to raise her voice against this infamous traffic, they have become the object of an immense and constantly increasing commerce.
The American palms are pre-eminent in beauty, and many of them rank highly in the list of useful plants.
The leaves of the Carnauba (Corypha cerifera) furnish an abundance of wax. The lowlands of Guiana, between 3° and 7° N. lat., are frequently covered with this social fan-palm, whose full-grown fronds, when cut and dried in the shade, cover themselves with light-coloured scales. These melt in a warmth of 206° F., and then form a straw-coloured liquid, which again concretes on cooling. It burns with as clear and bright a flame as the best bees’-wax, and will no doubt become a considerable article of trade, when once the spirit of industry awakens in those rich but thinly-populated regions. Like many other palms, the Carnauba does not confine her gifts to one single product. The boiled fruit is edible, and the pith of the young stems affords a nutritious fecula. Roofs thatched with its leaves resist for many years the effects of the weather, and its wood may be used for a variety of purposes.
A kind of wax, exuding from the rings of its trunk, is also produced by the beautiful Ceroxylon andicola, which grows on the slopes of the Andes, up to an elevation of eight thousand feet. Even the lofty vault of the Crystal Palace would be unable to span this majestic palm, which, according to Humboldt’s accurate measurement, towers one hundred and eighty feet above the ground, and bears a tuft of fronds each twenty-four feet long.