Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 2.djvu/319

 French peasant, and thanks to this quality, the rugged slopes of the hills, formerly strewn with stones or overgrown with scrub, are now clothed with the olive and other useful plants. "What would become of me," cries the land in a native legend, "were man to forsake me? Must I return to my first state, and again become the haunt of wild beasts? So minutely is the land subdivided, that in

some cases a single olive-tree is shared among several owners. Hence the soil has acquired an excessive value in the more densely peopled tracts, the average price being from twenty to a hundred times higher in the Kabyle than in the Arab districts,

Nor are the Berbers less distinguished for their industrial than for their