LAKE OF TIBERIAS
In his team he seldom drives two of a kind. It is a cow and a donkey, or a scabby, bony ghost of a pony and a camel. You can yoke them as you please. Palestine is a land that knows no shame, and so the horse does not rebel at being harnessed with a cow. Lazy as he is, the Bedouin is always up at dawn. At dusk he goes to his mat to sleep; he cannot read, and the villages burn no night-lights.
Cleverly holding his simple plough upright with one hand, he pelts clods at the team or wields a long goad with the other. Up and down he scratches little gutters a few inches apart, his camel towering ludicrously above his ass. Usually, he sows his seeds in strips before the plough. He rarely harrows and never rolls, but sometimes he shows a sense of the value of fallow by ploughing twice. The rest he leaves to Allah.
Sometimes, in the spring, he will pluck the wild turnip and radish and other tares from the growing corn. As a rule he prefers to sit in his coloured rags in the pleasant sunshine. Or he may go off to Jaffa with his asses and his women, and traffic in oranges. Then you see him, with both asses and women brutally overloaded, goading the donkey, or perhaps astride behind the burden of fruit, as the little long-eared slave totters along the tracks. The women, like the asses, never protest. The man is master. It is the way of the East.
The beautiful lilies and poppies vanish as summer comes upon the rolling, treeless plain. The corn ripens and harvesting begins. Machinery plays as little part here to-day as it did among the “alien corn” near Bethlehem long ago, when pretty Ruth worked for Boaz. In Palestine the world has stood still for a thousand years or more, or when it moved it moved backward. Much of the barley and wheat is pulled up, roots and all, but some is cut with sickles. In each village there is a harvest floor—a patch of clean, hard ground, where each man builds his little stack and sees about the threshing.
Occasionally you see the flail at work, but it is not popular. To wield the flail is hard work. So the Bedouin employs his cattle, his wives and his children. He spreads the loose crop in a little circle about two feet deep. Donkeys and oxen and ponies are then tied together, from two to four abreast, and goaded round and round upon the straw. Sometimes the threshing is done by their hoofs alone; but often a rude wooden sledge is drawn after them. Time is of no concern. The cattle barely move; the owner sits with his friends under the shade of an olive tree, smoking many cigarettes and occasionally dreaming luxuriously over his hubble-bubble; pleasant breezes blow across from the gleaming Mediterranean. The season has been generous: Allah is good. Why hurry?
The threshing finished, rough wooden forks are used to remove the coarsest straw, and then the winnowing begins. Day after day the harvest is thrown high into the air, and, slowly but surely, the chaff and dross are separated from the grain by the Mediterranean breezes.
Then the Turk comes—or he did before the war—and takes from thirty to sixty bushels out of every hundred! That is why the Bedouin is so fond of glinting in the sunshine, like the piece of glass bottle in the old fairy tale.
H. S. G.