DAHR, LEBANON — CRIST 409 



hillside so steep and narrow in many places that the oxen used to pull 

 the primitive wooden plows through the soil are with difficulty kept 

 from falling onto the next terrace. But it is from these terraced 

 strips that the villagers live. Four men in the village have between 

 them in the valley 37 acres of irrigated land which is intensively 

 worked and annually produces olives, figs, and grapes, and a winter 

 cereal crop of wheat or barley, which, harvested in June, is usually 

 followed by a crop of Indian corn or fast growing vegetables. Thus 

 the entire base of arable land of the village consists of approximately 

 200 acres of unirrigated land, of which the greater part is left fallow 

 every other year in order to enrich the soil and permit the accumula- 

 tion of moisture in it, and some 37 acres of intensively cultivated 

 irrigated land, on which heavy yields are obtained by the use of much 

 animal fertilizer. There is also common land, which is estimated 

 to be between 250 and 300 acres in extent, on which goats graze and 

 from which thorny scrub is cut for fuel. Only one man from outside 

 the village rents a few strips of village land, on halves. Two Dahr men 

 rent some 15 acres of irrigated land in neighboring valleys. All the 

 unirrigated land is in narrow strips and so full of stones that one 

 wonders how the grain has a chance to grow at all. Terracing is 

 extensively practiced ; and one cannot but marvel at the human indus- 

 try and patience necessary to construct the massive stone walls that 

 separate and in reality support the long narrow strips, many of 

 them less than a yard wide. Trying to determine how many people 

 this unirrigated land would support in the United States is a waste 

 of time, for there it would not be used at all. 



THE VILLAGE 



The village of Dahr itself is an agglomeration of 27 occupied stone 

 houses, with a population in winter which numbers 137 persons. To 

 be sure, many young men leave to work during the harvest season 

 on the large estates along the coast, and whole families move for the 

 summer months to houses near the irrigated lands below. The houses 

 of limestone, with roofs of rolled earth or cement, are separated from 

 each other by thick stone walls. There are no streets, just narrow 

 and tortuous footpaths where both human beings and pack animals 

 stumble over the loose stones. A house frequently shelters, besides 

 the owner and his wife and younger children, a young married son 

 who cannot yet afford to build a house of his own. Kepresentatives 

 of five generations in a single family will frequently be living in the 

 same house, or agglomeration of rooms, for early marriages and many 

 children are the rule. The lives of these villagers may seem to the 

 foreigner to be colorless and dull, yet the people at the various stages 

 in the life cycle, whether children, young adults, middle-aged, or old, 



