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Updated: June 6, 2025
After extraction the pulp is eagerly accepted by cattle, so no part of the valued fruit is wasted. One of the giants of the forest, said to be four hundred years old, has before now given shade to a regiment of soldiers; I saw for myself that the circumference of its branches was more than two hundred feet. But it must not be thought that the Argan Forest is composed entirely of these trees.
The legends of these haunted Argan forests remind us of the enchanted wood of Tasso, whose enchantment was dissolved by the gallant knight, Rinaldo, and which enabled the Crusaders to procure wood for the machines of war to assault and capture the Holy City. Two quotations will shew the universality and permanence of superstition, begotten of human hopes and fears.
I strolled for an hour or more, listening to the "wandering voice," heedless of what passed me by, at peace with all the world, and resolved to shoot no more. Alas, for good intentions! Coming suddenly into a great clearing girdled by argan trees, I flushed two large birds some forty yards away. The first was missed, the second came down and proved to be a Lesser Bustard or boozerat quite a prize.
Southern Morocco would be lost indeed without argan oil, which is used for cooking purposes as a substitute for butter, and of which we had with us a large supply. The oil is extracted from the fruit of the tree: at the end of March it should be fit to gather, looking much like a large olive, and possessed of a green fleshy husk, greedily eaten by camels, goats, sheep, and oxen.
"He has been lying under an argan tree, one standing well away from the rest at a point where the stream turns sharply, about a mile from the old kasbah in the wood, and he has moved now to make a new lair. I have made a note of his feet in my book; he had been wallowing less than twenty-four hours before when I found him.
Bushes of underwood covering sandy mounds, a few palmettos and Argan trees, in which wild doves fluttered and flew about, were all that broke the monotony of a perfect waste. There were no cultivated lands hereabouts, and I was told that a great part of Morocco presents this desolate aspect.
And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Harpagon is the tragic figure of Monomania; and as to Argan, ah, what havoc in "les entrailles de Monsieur" must have been wrought by those prescriptions! Et patati, et patata.
In the south, grows a tree peculiar to this country, the Eloeondenron Argan, so called from its Arabic name Argan. This tree produces fruit resembling the olive, whose egg-shaped, brown, smooth and very hard stone, encloses a flat almond, of a white colour, and of a very disagreeable taste, which, when crushed, produces a rancid oil, used commonly as a substitute for olive-oil.
These Argan forests continued under the fearful ban of the enchantress and wicked jinns, until a holy man was brought from the farthest desert upon the back of a flying camel, who set free the spell-bound wood by tying on each bewitched tree a small piece of cork bark on which was inscribed the sacred name of the Deity.
One or two grizzled huntsmen who had followed every track in the Argan Forest were waiting in the patio for his final instructions, and he told them of hoof prints that had revealed to his practised eye a "solitaire" boar of more than ordinary size. He had tracked it for more than three hours on the previous day, past the valley where our tents were set, and knew now where the lair was chosen.
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