362 SYRIAN TOBACCO FIELDS. 



East Africa. Planted at the end of the rains, it gains strength 

 by sun and dew, and is harvested in October. It is prepared 

 for sale in different forms. Everywhere, however, a simple 

 sun-drying supplies the place of cocking and sweating, and 

 the people are not so fastidious as to reject the lower or 

 coarser leaves and those tainted by the earth. Usumbara 

 produces what is considered at Zanzibar a superior article ; it 

 is kneaded into little circular cakes four inches in diameter 

 by half an inch deep : rolls of these cakes are neatly packed 

 in plantain-leaves for exportation. The next in order of 

 excellence is that grown in Uhiao : it is exported in leaf or 

 in the form called kambari, roll-tobacco, a circle of coils each 

 about an inch in diameter. The people of Khutu and Usa- 

 gara mould the pounded and wetted material into discs like 

 cheeses, 8 or 9 inches across by 2 or 3 in depth, and weigh- 

 ing about 3 Ibs.; they supply the Wagogo with tobacco, 

 taking in exchange for it salt. The leaf in Unyamwezi gen- 

 erally is soft and perishable, that of Usukuma being the 

 worst ; it is sold in blunt cones, so shaped by the mortars in 

 which they are pounded. At Karaguah, according to the 

 Arabs, the tobacco, a superior variety, tastes like musk in 

 the water-pipe. The produce of TJjiji is better than that of 

 Unyamwezi ; it is sold in leaf, and 'is called by the Arabs 

 hamumi, after a well-known growth in Hazramaut. It is 

 impossible to give an average price to tobacco in East Africa ; 

 it varies from 1 khete of coral beads per 6 oz. to 2 Ibs." 



Some of the most beautiful and fragrant tobacco fields in 

 the world are to be found in Syria. Indeed it may truthfully 

 be said that a field of Latakia tobacco is hardly inferior in 

 beauty to the large and fragrant orchards of the olive and 

 mulberry, or the wheat fields on the terraced sides of Mount 

 Lebanon. 



The tobacco plant is cultivated in various parts of Syria 

 and particularly by the Druses on " The Lebanon," as it is 

 usually called. 



The cultivation of tobacco in Syria, has been a consider- 

 able industry, and the product has acquired a reputation in 

 European markets that has demonstrated its real value, and 

 a constant demand for this variety of the plant. Latakia 

 tobacco resembles in flavor the yellow tobacco of Eastern 

 Thibet and Western China, both of them grown from the 



