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Updated: June 23, 2025
That side of the city where the early battles had taken place was almost abandoned. The guardians on the wall greeted Actæon with loud shouts of surprise and joy, and they lowered a rope of esparto to help him climb up by means of the rough places on the wall, until he could enter through a crenel near the top. All surrounded the Greek eagerly. It seemed as if he were in the presence of spectres.
The scorpion is another peril to the esparto picker. The great rock-scorpion of the Sahara is about as ugly as the centipede of Arizona and Mexico; in size it is also about as large from six to ten inches in length. Its sting, too, is about as dangerous as the fangs of the rattler. But the esparto picker has a method of heroic treatment for both the bite of the viper and the sting of the scorpion.
The clump of esparto, into the bottom of which he must reach to cut the mature stalks, is quite likely to be the lair of a poisonous viper; and if the reptile sinks its fangs into the flesh of the unfortunate picker, long weeks of suffering and disability perhaps death are in store for him. Between the bite of a rattler and that of an esparto viper there is little to choose.
He had thought horses looked too heavy for those unreal fragilities, so he had harnessed instead eight mules, with white reins, decorated with bows and pompons and bells, and caparisoned from head to foot in that marvellous Esparto work an art Provence has borrowed from the Moors and perfected. How could the Bey not be pleased!
Forgetting all else, she ran to meet him, and, clasped in each other's arms, they kissed one another upon the lips again and again. The bells of Santa Teresa that Felipe had heard that night on the blanks of the Esparto rang for a wedding the next day. Two days after they tolled as passing bells.
The wood pulp of Norway and the United States is slowly displacing it, and in time esparto will be but little used except for making cordage or gunny cloth. Already the French Government is having troubles of its own in providing employment for the esparto pickers, but it is not likely that such a useful plant will be discarded; on the contrary, its use is likely to increase in the future.
At one end shepherds from the mountain, dressed in esparto, ferocious of aspect, and armed with lances, watched over cattle and horses offered for sale.
The esparto grass is delivered to the nearest local market compressed in bales of five or six hundred weight, held together by a coarse netting of esparto weave, and shipped to Europe. Nearly all of it goes to Great Britain. There it is shredded and made into cordage, coarse cloth, or paper. But the esparto has a rival so far as its use in making paper is concerned.
There is much that is interesting in paper making. The best paper is made from linen rags but many other substances are used, cotton rags, esparto grass, straw, etc. Very common paper, such as that used for the daily newspapers, is made from wood pulp. Paper is made in two ways, by hand and by machinery. Hand made paper is made by means of a mould and a deckle.
Bread-stuffs and Numidian wines were bartered for the flocks of the Aures, leather, dates, and the esparto basket-work of the regions of Sahara. The marbles of Simitthu, the citron-wood of which they made precious tables, were doubtless handled there. The neighbouring forests could furnish building materials to the whole country.
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