The Great Difficulty In Cyprus
Consists In Reducing The Soil To A Fine Surface; Huge Lumps Of Tenacious
Earth Are Turned Up By The Plough, Which, Under The Baking Influence Of
The Sun, Become As Hard As Sun-Dried Bricks.
The native method of
crushing is exceedingly rude and ineffective.
A heavy plank about
sixteen feet long and three inches thick, furnished with two rings, is
dragged by oxen over the surface; which generally remains in so rough a
state that walking over the field is most laborious. There are many
stone columns lying useless among the heaps of ruins so common in
Cyprus, that would form excellent rollers, but the idea of such an
implement has never entered the Cypriote head. The plough,
smoothing-plank, and the ancient threshing-harrow, composed of two broad
planks inlaid with sharp flint stones, are the only farm machinery of
the cultivator. As in the days of Abraham the oxen drew this same
pattern of harrow over the corn, and reduced the straw to a coarse chaff
mingled with the grain, so also the treatment in Cyprus remains to the
present day. The result is a mixture of dirt and sand which is only
partially rejected by the equally primitive method of winnowing.
Mr. Hamilton Lang gives an amusing description of the strictly
conservative principles of the Cyprian oxen, which have always been fed
upon the straw broken by the process described in threshing by the
harrow of sharp flints. This coarse chaff, mixed with cotton-seed,
lentils, or barley, is eaten by all animals with avidity, and the
bullocks positively refused Mr. Lang's new food, which was the same
straw passed through an English threshing-machine and cut fine by a
modern chaff-cutter. This fact is a warning to those who would introduce
too sudden reforms among men and animals in a newly-acquired country;
but if Mr. Hamilton Lang had sprinkled salt over his chaff I think the
refractory appetites of the oxen might have been overcome. A pair of
oxen are supposed to plough one "donum" daily of fifty paces square, or
about half an acre.
Having watched the various teams, and conversed with the ploughmen by
the medium of the cook Christo, who spoke English and was an intelligent
interpreter, I ordered the vans to move on while I walked over the
country with the dogs. There was no game except a wild-duck which I shot
in the thick weeds of a neighbouring swamp. Larks were in great
quantities, and for want of larger birds I shot enough for a pilaff, and
secured a breakfast. The route, which could be hardly called a road, had
been worn by the wheels of native carts. These were narrower than our
vans, and one of our wheels was generally upon a higher level,
threatening on some occasions to overturn. The country around us was
desolate in its aridity. We passed through the ruins of an ancient city
over which the plough had triumphed, and literally not one stone was
left upon another.
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