THE AFGHAN DELIMITATION COMMISSION. 15 
height the annual shoots are removed. When the trees are large, they give shelter gene- 
rally to the orchard, and are kept for their fruit, which, although poor in the extreme, is 
colleeted and dried in the sun for the purpose of being subsequently ground into flour 
and made, mixed with ordinary flour, into bread. After seeing the soil on which the 
mulberries were collected, and that on which they are placed to dry, I never wish to taste 
another Afghan dried mulberry! There could not be а more prolifie source for the 
propagation of disease. Тһе other orchard-trees were apricots, plums, apples, cherries, 
quinces, jujubes, E/eagnus, and vines. Тһе last are either permitted to climb on the trees 
in the orchard, or are planted in deep broad trenches, the soil from which is made into 
a sloping bank with a northern exposure. On the banks the vines are either allowed 
directly to trail, or are supported on a lattice-work fixed on the slope so as to keep the 
fruit from coming into contact with the ground. 
Occasionally pears, peaches, almonds, pomegranates, and figs are grown in the better 
class of orchards, where it is very common to see both yellow and red roses. Тһе 
latter, В. damascena, is cultivated for the distillation of rose-water, and Rubia tinctorum 
for its roots as a dye-stuff; and under the trees, Medicago and Trigonella are usually 
cultivated for fodder. Ав garden-crops numerous kinds of vegetables are cultivated, of 
which the Afghans are extremely fond, and some of them are excellent in quality. Even 
in England one scarcely expects to see finer beetroot, carrots, turnips, onions, or cabbages 
than are grown here, besides radishes, tomatos, brinjals, and chillies, which are all fairly 
good, with numerous pot-herbs. Requiring more саге than ordinary field-crops, opium, 
tobacco, and some oil-seeds are also grown in gardens. 
The field-cultivation consists primarily of wheat, which is fairly good; but in some 
localities it is overgrown with rye, which is an indigenous weed. Barley of two kinds is 
grown; the finer, and the grain of which is the sweeter and considered fit for human food, 
is Hordeum hexastichon, which is said to take a month longer to ripen than the other. 
The grain of Hordeum vulgare is only considered suitable for horses, &с.; but as it takes 
much less time to ripen, it is occasionally grown as a second crop; usually there is no 
such thing as a second crop, in these parts, of any produce. 
Only when water can be liberally supplied is Sorghum, the greater millet, grown as a 
crop by itself; it is commonly seen spread at irregular distances in fields of tobacco or of 
melons. Cotton is grown to some extent, but the staple cannot be compared with that 
from Turkistan. І should say that water-melons rank next to wheat in value as a 
food-crop. During two or three months of the hot weather the natives seem to live 
entirely upon them with a little bread; and they contain so much saccharine matter that 
in Herat a syrup or sugar is extracted from them. Ordinary melons are cultivated, but 
in much less quantity than the water-melon, and mixed with them is a great variety of 
pumpkins and other СиситЬ асе. In these melon-fields it is curious to see, either 
sprinkled thinly through them, or growing in single lines along the outer margin of the 
fields, the castor-oil plant, cultivated as it was in Griffith’s time, for its oil for burning, 
the inhabitants being still ignorant of its uses as a medicine. The cultivated trees in the | 
vicinity of villages and in orchards are an ash, an elm, the Lombardy poplar, Pinus 
halepensis, and several large willows, and, rarely, the Oriental plane. 
