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Then it will be necessary to follow the Tigris in a wide détour, and none but the ships of the desert, the camels, will be able to traverse this plain, and they only by night. Our caravan consists of six hundred camels and four hundred mules. The big bags carried by the former contain almost exclusively palm-nuts for the dye houses of Aleppo, and cotton.
He was hitting out at them with his heavy hand, and most of them were bleeding. "There is poison in that bag," they cried. "No, Ma, only my palm-nuts and cartridges." Quietly, firmly, persistently, she demanded the bag. He threw it at her. Opening it she found palm-nuts and cartridges. For a moment she looked foolish, but diving deeper she pulled out no fewer than forty of the deadly beans.
Two canoes passed us, that had been robbed by Mariano's band of everything they had in them; the owners were gathering palm-nuts for their subsistence. They wore palm-leaf aprons, as the robbers had stripped them of their clothing and ornaments. Dead bodies floated past us daily, and in the mornings the paddles had to be cleared of corpses, caught by the floats during the night.
He feeds in a general way upon palm-nuts, bananas, mangoes, and guavas, but he is by no means averse, if opportunity offers, to the Indian corn of the industrious native. His wife accompanies him in his solitary rambles, for they are not gregarious. In her native haunts, indeed, Polly is an unsociable bird.
The whole surface was literally covered with them, just like an an apple-orchard after a stormy night, only that the palm-nuts lay thicker upon the ground than I had ever seen apples so thick that there was no picking of steps among them, and in some places it was impossible to set down the foot without treading upon and crushing them.
Indeed it seems as nature would make us amends for the cruel storm, for the poor trees have suffered greatly." "Aye, comrade," quoth I, "so is there much fruit for us to gather ere it rot, and great store of palm-nuts, which are good food and useful in a thousand ways." "But nature is very cruel, Martin, for I have seen many birds lying dead and over yonder a poor goat crushed by a tree."
We had not time to bestow much labour on them. Next morning we again set out, carrying this time a couple of large bowls, which, Uncle Paul said, would be required. On arriving at the hut, he placed one of them on the ground, and then piled up inside the hut a number of the palm-nuts collected on the previous day.
It pains one's heart to see the shirking of work, the slipping away into the bush for a sleep, and the roasting of maize and palm-nuts 'ground-pigs' fare, they call the latter whenever an opportunity occurs. The dawdling walk and the dragging of one leg after the other, with intervals to stand and scratch, are a caution.
And so you see how it is that the strength of a lion makes the other animals afraid when the big animals hunt. Elephants do not need to fear lions, for the big animals, with trunks and tusks, do not eat the same kind of food lions eat. Elephants live on grass, hay, palm-nuts and things that grow.
That intercourse is always said to have been cut off by some human error; for example, the Fernando Po people say that once upon a time there was no trouble or serious disturbance upon earth because there was a ladder, made like the one you get palm-nuts with, "only long, long;" and this ladder reached from earth to heaven so the gods could go up and down it and attend personally to mundane affairs.
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