From the East Unto the West (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PUZZLE OF JARBEK j IFE seems, as a rule, simple and easy enough from year's end to year's end, for the few inhabitants of Jarbek, a little valley which, by some caprice of Nature is covered, not like the surrounding vast plains with drifts of red sand, but with a deep black loam, wherein vegetation thrives exceedingly beneath a fervid sun. The Jarbekians shelter themselves from its beams in half-a-score of mud- walled huts, sleekly thatched with dried grass. If an Irish cabin had its angles all rounded off into curves, and its eaves drawn down to within a foot or so of the ground, it would look very like a Jarbekian dwelling. In Jarbek fruit may chance to be rather more plentiful at one season than another, so that mothers of families sometimes let the children play at ball with the biggest oranges, and pod fresh bananas, and smash up fine melons by the dozen, just for diversion, but sometimes restrict them to the use of inferior qualities for their games. This is almost the only measure of economy ever taken in Jarbek. Why, indeed, should anybody be over-careful? There stand the slender- shafted date-palms all laden with ponderous clusters of clear-amber sacs, filled with sheer syrup of sunshine; there the dark green and purple figsswell and crack their skins in a profusion scarcely screened by their ample leaves; and the trellis- work of grapes and gourds climbs and creeps in endless intricacy about fields where maize and millet flourish, or where browse long-haired white goats and dust-coloured camels; while, surest pledge of plenty, never-failing springs of cold, delicious water well up among the rocks, with perpetual sobbing and murmuring, as if it fretted for liberty to rush forth and lose itself among the leagues of burning sand. The air that wafts over them to J...