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Updated: June 4, 2025
Under the Mombins the undergrowth is, for the most part, huge fans of Cocorite palm, thirty or forty feet high, their short rugged trunks, as usual, loaded with creepers, orchids, birds'-nests, and huge round black lumps, which are the nests of ants; all lodged among the butts of old leaves and the spathes of old flowers.
Before us lay the tranquil lake flecked with islands, which looked like floating gardens of green on a purple mirror. Near us a wooden bridge led across a shallow cove passing between myriads of pickerel weed whose light purple spathes formed a striking mass of color. Beneath it long, slender patches of silvery blue rushes made magic hedges, so symmetrical as to seem clipped by the hand of art.
We had many an interesting stroll round the sultan's gardens at Al Koton, and watched the cultivation of spices and vegetables for the royal table, or rather floor; the lucerne and clover for his cattle, the indigo and henna for dyeing purposes, and the various kinds of grain. But on the cultivation of the date-palm the most attention is lavished; it was just then the season at which the female spathe has to be fructified by the male pollen, and we were interested in watching a man going round with an apron full of male spathes. With these he climbed the stem of the female palm, and with a knife cut open the bark which encircles the female spathe, and as he shook the male pollen over it he chanted in a low voice, 'May God make you grow and be fruitful. No portion of the palm is wasted in the Hadhramout: with the leaves they thatch huts and make fences, the date stones are ground into powder as food for cattle, and they eat the nutty part which grows at the bottom of the spathes, and which they called kourzan. On a journey a man requires nothing but a skin of dates, which will last him for days, and, when we left, Sultan Sal
Just as we were there they were very busy with the spathes, and in Thursday's Market huge baskets of the male spathes were exposed for sale. The palm-groves are surrounded by dykes to keep the water in. The date-tree is everything to a Bahreini.
It wriggles up and along a ridge, with the glaucous spathes of grass trees standing like spears on each hand, and where wattle and tough she-oaks grow leanly out of hard soil, thickly strewn with buckshot gravel, rust-coloured. Soon it descends into a low valley and through a belt of fan-palms and jungle bordering an ever-flowering stream the banks of which are knee-deep in fat, rich loam.
In many valleys the chiefs lead in the making of the illicit namu enata, or cocoanut-brandy. In the Philippines, where millions of gallons of cocoanut-brandy are made, it is called tuba, but usually its name is arrack throughout tropical Asia. Fresh from the flower spathes of the cocoanut-tree, namu tastes like a very light, creamy beer or mead.
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