Face of the Country.
Products of the Desert.
Besides bajra we may mention moth and til;[[5]] the former a useful pulse both for men and cattle; the other the oil-plant, used both for culinary purposes and burning. Wheat, gram, and barley are produced in the favoured spots described, but in these are enumerated the staple products of Bikaner.
Cotton is grown in the tracts favourable for wheat.[[6]] The plant is said to be septennial, even decennial, in these regions. As soon as the cotton is gathered, the shoots are all cut off, and the root alone left. Each succeeding year, the plant increases in strength, and at length attains a size unknown where it is more abundantly cultivated.
Nature has bountifully supplied many spontaneous vegetable products for the use of man, and excellent pasture for cattle. Guar, Kachri, Kakri, all of the cucurbitaceous family, and water-melons of a gigantic size, are produced in great plenty.[[7]] The latter is most valuable; for being cut in slices and dried in the sun, it is stored up [201] for future use when vegetables are scarce, or in times of famine, on which they always calculate. It is also an article of commerce, and much admired even where vegetables are more abundant. The copious mucilage of the dried melon is extremely nourishing; and deeming it valuable as an anti-scorbutic in sea voyages, the Author sent some of it to Calcutta many years ago for experiment.[[8]] Our Indian ships would find no difficulty in obtaining a plentiful supply of this article, as it can be cultivated to any extent, and thus be made to confer a double benefit on our seamen and the inhabitants of those desert regions. The superior magnitude of the water-melons of the desert over those of interior India gives rise to much exaggeration, and it has been gravely asserted by travellers in the sand tibas,[[9]] where they are most abundant, that the mucilage of one is sufficient to allay the thirst both of a horse and his rider.
In these arid regions, where they depend entirely on the heavens for water, and where they calculate on a famine every seventh year, nothing that can administer to the wants of man is lost. The seeds of the wild grasses, as the bharut, baru, harara, sawan, are collected, and, mixed with bajra-flour, enter much into the food of the poorer classes. They also store up great quantities of the wild ber, khair, and karel berries; and the long pods of the khejra, astringent and bitter as they are, are dried and formed into a flour. Nothing is lost in these regions which can be converted into food.
Trees.
The ak, a species of euphorbia, known in Hindustan as the madar, grows to an immense height and strength in the desert; from its fibres they make the ropes in general use throughout these regions, and they are reckoned superior, both in substance and durability, to those formed of munj (hemp), which is however cultivated in the lands of the Bidawats.
Their agricultural implements are simple and suited to the soil. The plough is one [202] of single yoke, either for the camel or ox: that with double yoke being seldom required, or chiefly by the Malis (gardeners), when the soil is of some consistence. The drill is invariably used, and the grains are dropped singly into the ground, at some distance from each other, and each sends forth a dozen to twenty stalks. A bundle of bushes forms their harrow. The grain is trodden out by oxen; and the moth (pulse), which is even more productive than the bajra, by camels.
Water.—This indispensable element is at an immense distance from the surface throughout the Indian desert, which, in this respect, as well as many others, differs very materially from that portion of the great African Desert in the same latitudes. Water at twenty feet, as found at Mourzook by Captain Lyon, is here unheard of, and the degree of cold experienced by him at Zuela, on the winter solstice, would have “burnt up” every natural and cultivated production of our Hindu Sahara. Captain Lyon describes the thermometer in lat. 26°, within 2° of zero of Reaumur. Majors Denham and Clapperton never mark it under 40° of Fahrenheit, and mention ice, which I never saw but once, the thermometer being 28°; and then not only the mouths of our mashaks, or ‘water-skins,’ were frozen, but a small pond, protected from the wind (I heard, for I saw it not), exhibited a very thin pellicle of ice. When at 30° the cold was deemed intense by the inhabitants of Maru in the tracts limiting the desert, and the useful ak, and other shrubs, were scorched and withered; and in north lat. 25°, the thermometer being 28°, desolation and woe spread throughout the land. To use their own phrase, the crops of gram and other pulses were completely “burnt up, as if scorched by the lightnings of heaven”; while the sun’s meridian heat would raise it 50° more, or up to 80°, a degree of variability at least not recorded by Captain Lyon.