GARDENS--OLIVE-GROVES--BIRDS, ETC.
In January 1884, Mr. H. Chichester Hart visited Gaza, and contributed
a valuable paper to the _Quarterly Statement_ of the Palestine
Exploration Fund, October 1885, entitled "A Naturalist's Journey to
Sinai, Petra, and Southern Palestine." From Chapter XI, Gaza to Jaffa,
I cull a few items of general interest--
"Gardens of fruit-trees, olive-groves, and enclosures, hedged by the
prickly pear, reached our camp from the inland side. The trees at Gaza
are chiefly date-palms,[46] olives, sycamore-fig, carob or locust-tree,
and fig; a very handsome tamarisk reaches a height of thirty or forty
feet, and has light green foliage, very refreshing and home-like after
the dull grey or lifeless green of the desert. The olives are of
enormous age. They usually have unbranched trunks, two or three feet
in height, then perhaps divided, and at seven or eight feet the leafy
canopy, browsed below to a level height by cattle, begins. The average
height of the tree is twenty to twenty-five or thirty feet. Old trees
have often mere shells of their trunks remaining. I measured the two
largest I saw, a few miles north of Gaza; their girth was eighteen and
twenty feet respectively at two feet from the ground, a size which was
maintained, or very nearly so, till the trunk forked."
Gaza is quite embowered in these great olive-groves, which stretch
north-eastwards the whole four miles to Beit Hanûn.
These magnificent groves are the largest in Palestine. They are said to
have been planted by the Greeks, and it is asserted that at all events
since the coming of the Saracens some seven hundred years back, not
a single new tree has been planted. Most of the trees stand on huge
roots, and have evidently sprung up from the remains of former trunks
rotted away.
Lentils are a common crop. Gaza trades with an excellent quality of
barley to Egypt. Consequently, wealth increases, but the population,
being still in a low state of civilisation, live poorly. Even the
well-to-do have as a daily meal "fûl" (beans) with an onion, and a
piece of roughly ground barley bread. Meat is not wanted.
The luxuriance of the gardens and orchards, remarkable for the scarlet
blossoms of the pomegranates, and the enormous oranges which gild the
green foliage of their groves, is due to the abundance of water, drawn
from twenty wells of fresh water bursting from the sandy soil--some of
them are not less that 150 feet deep. The natives greatly prize the
quality of the water. Good water is, indeed, plentiful at greater or
less depth over all the district, even on the sea-shore, though the
frequency of rubble cisterns to the south and east show that in ancient
times the inhabitants depended largely on artificial supply.
Gaza and Ascalon have always been noted for their wells.[47]
In and about the Gaza olive-groves, several birds familiar in Great
Britain abound. There are English sparrows, swallows, buntings,
goldfinches, black redstarts, chaffinches, stonechats, willow-wrens,
chiff-chaffs, blackbirds, and hooded crows. Other birds seen are
Egyptian kites, buzzards (common species), "boomey" or little southern
owl, red-breasted Cairo swallows, pelicans, dunlins, calandra and
crested larks, bulbuls, pied-chats, and Menetrie's wheatear.
Frequently dogs with unmistakable traces of jackal parentage are seen.
It is by no means uncommon for these vagrant animals to interbreed
along this part of the Mediterranean seaboard.
At the risk of some repetitions, I have gladly availed myself of the
opportunity of making use of a few details published in the late Annual
Reports by Mr. A. A. Knesevich, H.B.M. Consular Agent at Gaza.
During my first visit to Gaza, in July 1891, my tent was pitched in
the Muslim cemetery, which stretches over a wide space on the west
of the city. The graves are generally covered by a small erection of
mud-brick, plastered over and whitewashed. The cemetery is not enclosed
by any fence.
FOOTNOTES:
[46] The palm is the tree of the desert. It grows luxuriantly not only
in the rich soil of Egypt, but in the sandy borders at Gaza.
[47] It is remarkable that both the two celebrated early Palestinian
wells noted in the old Testament are still in existence: (1) Abraham's
well at Beersheba (Gen. xxi. 30); and (2) the well of Bethlehem, for
whose water David thirsted (1 Chron. xi. 17).