Page:Domestic Life in Palestine.pdf/132

Rh clothes were hanging on the tree above her, not for the sake of drying them, but the branch was her clothes-peg, and the tree her wardrobe. Two basins were behind the tree trunk, and the remains of a wood-fire between two blocks of stone. This was her kitchen. We greeted her with, "Peace be upon you;" but she gave us only gloomy answers, saying, "For me there is no peace," and still continued fingering her beads, without raising her head. She said an "evil eye " had looked upon her and had "destroyed the power" of her life.

A pleasant sound of falling water attracted us up to the large, square, raised, stone reservoir, round which, seated on a low parapet, a party of Arabs were smoking and chatting. Water was falling with some force into this pool, from a duct supplied by large earthenware jars, fixed with ropes, made of palm-fiber, to a large wheel. The wheel was kept in motion by a blindfolded mule, and as it turned round it dipped into a well, and the jars were filled with water, and in rising up again they emptied themselves into the duct, and so on again and again, as long as the mule kept up its monotonous round, urged on by a little barefooted boy, stick in hand. A hole in the lower part of the wall of the reservoir was every day unplugged for a certain time, and the water allowed to flow into the little channels or furrows which traversed the beds of vegetables and encircled the trees.

As we left the garden, a donkey, laden with the red shells or rinds of pomegranates, passed us. I was surprised to learn that the bright yellow dye used to stain leather is prepared from them.

We were walking toward the sands, through the burial ground. The sun had set. We had left behind us at some distance all the evening loungers about the town-gate, and all the smokers by the well-side and the garden, when we saw advancing toward us, in the twilight, a powerful-looking black man, girdled with sackcloth, carrying a staff, or rather the trunk of a slender tree, which still retained two