The agricultural appliances used in the oasis are naturally of a very primitive character. The whole of the cultivation, so far as I saw, was done with the ordinary fas, or hoe, to be met with in the Nile Valley. In reaping and pruning a curious toothed sickle is used. The actual blade is pointed and almost at right angles to the iron shaft, the end of which is inserted into a wooden handle. Ploughs are, so far as I saw, never used.
FLOUR MILL, RASHIDA.
At Rashida I was shown a flour mill belonging to the ’omda which was of a rather interesting type. The two stones between which the grain was ground were of unequal size—the upper one being considerably smaller than the lower. The bottom stone was hollowed out, and the upper one, rotated by an ox walking round and round in a circle, revolved in the recess in the lower stone, which was fixed in the ground. Suspended over the millstones, by a four-legged wooden frame, was a box in which the grain to be ground was poured, a tube from the bottom of the box delivering the grain to the junction between the upper and lower millstones. The flour was drawn off through a hole in the lower stone into a basket placed in a cutting in the ground in which this stone was embedded.
A large part of the grain consumed in the oases is not ground in a mill, but prepared by the women in a much more primitive manner—this is especially the case with rice, which is largely consumed by the poorest inhabitants. Basin-shaped hollows, about a foot in diameter, are roughly scooped in the rock, frequently by the roadside, the grain is placed in these and pounded to powder by means of a large stone wielded with both hands.
Rashida is one of the few villages in the oasis which grows any number of olives. These are cultivated in sufficient quantities to warrant the erection of appliances for extracting the oil.
The olives are first crushed in a mill, a somewhat primitive arrangement consisting of an enormous stone wheel, about five feet in diameter, by eighteen inches thick, which is made to travel on its edge round and round a circular trough about six feet in diameter, by a man pushing against a beam, revolving the vertical pivot to which it is attached.
The mass of crushed olives when taken out of the trough is placed in a bag and squeezed under a screw press, also worked by a man pushing a bar on the principle of a capstan, the oil as it oozes out being collected in earthenware pans, or rather basins, placed below the press.
Butter is made by shaking the cream in a skin bag. A stick about ten feet long with a fork at the top is leant against a wall, and a goat-skin full of cream suspended by a rope from the fork. This is swung to and fro with a jerky motion until the butter has formed.
Unlike the natives of Dakhla and Kharga, who have no pretensions to a sporting character, those of Farafra Oasis are keen hunters. While in that oasis I saw several most ingenious appliances for catching game.