This is the sweetest chapter in the book. The pictures are enough to make
one's mouth water and give one an appetite for Arabian dates. I do not
suppose there is a boy or girl in England or America that has not eaten
the fruit of the Arabian palm tree; but how many of you know the taste of
sugar-cane?
In many parts of Arabia, especially at Busrah and along the river Tigris,
you can see the sugar-cane sellers sit by the wayside and dispose of this
Arabian stick-candy to the boys and girls in exchange for coppers. The
woman in the picture has chosen the shelter of a date tree and beside the
tall bundles of cane she has oranges for sale as well. The sugar-cane is
cut into pieces and sold "by the knot"; that is, by the length of the
stick from one knot to the next. It is not expensive and I have seen even
the very poorest children suck their cane on the way home as happy as
sugar can make them. The sugar-cane is a kind of grass but it grows to
twice the height of a boy and is over two inches in circumference. The
stems are smooth, shining and hard on the outside, but inside they are
porous and the pores are full of sugar sap. The sugar-cane first came from
India, but the Arabs spread its cultivation as far as Morocco and Sicily;
so that it is no wonder that the word "sugar" itself comes from the
Arabic. Yet it shows how ignorant the Arabs are to-day because, although
they have sugar-cane, _their_ sugar nearly all comes from Europe. They do
not know how to manufacture it and therefore eat the sugar-cane raw.
[Illustration: WOMAN SELLING SUGAR-CANE.]
Sweeter than sugar-cane and much more plentiful is the date. There is no
place in all Arabia where you do not see the date palm growing, and seldom
can you eat a meal in any part of the country but dates are part of the
bill-of-fare. In fact thousands of people in Arabia have nothing but dates
to eat from January to December! So plentiful are they that even donkeys
and camels are fed on dates in some districts.
Many of the dates you buy in your own country come from Arabia. On the
best kind of dates which come in wooden boxes you will find Muscat or
Busrah stamped to show from what place they were shipped. There are very
many kinds of dates in Arabia, and only a very few sorts are sent abroad.
Some of them are too delicate to stand the long voyage and others are
found only in small quantities. I do not think any of the dates that reach
America equal those we pick from the palm tree ourselves here in
Arabia--no more than dried apple rings taste as good as ripe juicy sweet
apples from the orchard. When the dates ripen in September they are
picked, sorted, and then packed in layers by the Arab women and boys who
get paid for this work. Large steamships are loaded down with these boxes
and many of them leave Busrah every year with no other cargo than dates.
[Illustration: DATES GROWING ON A DATE PALM.]
The date tree is very beautiful. I think it is the most beautiful of all
the palms. It is no wonder that a palm branch is the symbol of victory in
the Bible and that the psalmist compares the life of a righteous man to a
palm-tree! How straight and beautifully proportioned is the tall trunk of
the tree. It is an evergreen and is always flourishing winter and summer.
It is a lovely sight to see the huge clusters of ripening fruit,
golden-yellow or reddish-brown, amid the bright green branches. Along the
rivers in the north of Arabia, at Hassa and in Oman, date orchards stretch
for miles and miles as far as you can see. Some of the Arabs have such
large date gardens that they do not know the number of their trees. How do
you suppose they climb the tree? The Arabs have no ladders and indeed it
would be hard to make a ladder long enough to reach to the top of a tall
palm tree. So they use a rope band which goes around the trunk of the tree
and around their waist; it is shoved up little by little and the Arab puts
his bare feet on the rough bark of the tree and so climbs up as easily as
a monkey. The palm tree is perhaps the most useful tree in the world.
Every part of it is used for something or other, and I do not see how
Arabia could get along without palm trees. The fruit is prepared in many
different ways for food. The date stones are used by the Arab children in
playing checkers and other games on the smooth sand. They are also ground
up into a coarse kind of meal and this is good cattle-food. The branches
of the date tree are long and strong and thin just like a piece of rattan.
From them the carpenters make beds, tables, chairs, cradles, bird-cages,
reading-stands, boats, crates, kites and a dozen other useful things. The
leaves are woven into baskets, mats, fans and string. From the bark
excellent fibre makes rope of all sizes. Not a bit of the tree is wasted.
Even the blossoms are used to make a kind of drink and the old musty fruit
that cannot be eaten is made into date syrup or date vinegar.
In one of the pictures you see the fire wood market at Busrah. The long
branches you see are sold for kindling wood and they make a splendid fire.
The heavier parts of the tree are also used for fuel and the donkeys are
loaded with these date knots and date sticks in baskets. It is a busy
scene and, what with braying of donkeys and shouting of the
wood-merchants, there is enough noise too.
[Illustration: FIRE WOOD MARKET, BUSRAH.]
There is one more blessing that comes from the palm tree and which we have
forgotten. That is shade. Arabia is a hot and dry country. The summer sun
is much more piercing than in America and the summer is much longer. When
you travel a long camel journey across the desert, oh how good it is to
come to a grove of palm trees and rest! Such a place is called an _oasis_
and underneath the palms there are always springs of water. I can well
understand how happy the children of Israel were after their journey in
the desert, when they came to Elim where "there were twelve wells of
water and threescore and ten palm trees." In summer time many of the town
Arabs leave their houses in the city and go to camp out in the
date-gardens to enjoy the cool shades. The Arab poets have written many
poems in praise of their favourite tree and fruit, but none of them are so
funny as these lines which Campbell wrote from Algiers where the date tree
also flourishes and with which we will end this chapter:
"Though my letter bears date as you view
From the land of the date-bearing palm
I will palm no more puns upon you."