252 TROPICAL HARVESTS. 



The advent of the rains brings with it an immediate 

 and wondrous change. Where only just before all 

 appeared dry, dusty, and lifeless, the whole face of 

 Nature now bursts into verdure. The tremendous 

 downpour which usually takes place, quickly converts 

 the sun-dried earth into a mass of fertile mud ; and as 

 if by magic, trees burst into leaf; grass springs up; 

 and the whole country rapidly assumes the aspect of 

 a fertile garden. 



After the long sleep of Nature in dry regions, this 

 transformation often almost appears like the awakening 

 of the dead to a new life. The Moslem prophet has 

 in consequence adopted this metamorphosis as the 

 Mohammedan symbol of the resurrection, and in several 

 passages of the Koran it is used in this sense. In the 

 old world, as we know, most of the dry, sun-stricken 

 countries of the Northern hemisphere have been for 

 centuries the stronghold of Islam : the " Dar-El-Islam " 

 or the House of Islam, as they are termed by Moham- 

 medans, in contradistinction to the " Dar-El-Harb, " 

 or the " Abode of the Enemy " (that is to say the 

 country of the infidel). * 



In many parts of India, and other tropical countries, 

 no less than three harvests are gathered in, in the 

 course of a single year, and sometimes even a fourth 



* The world, in the eyes of strict Mohammedans, is divided into 

 these two great territories, and its inhabitants into but two great na- 

 tions the Faithful and the Infidel. The Moslem is a citizen of the 

 whole of the Dar-El-Islam, and "El Kafir," or the Infidel, is the 

 possessor of the rest. The climatic range of a certain form of religious 

 opinions, as if they were a species of sunloving vegetable growth, is 

 a remarkable fact the Dar-El-Islam in the sense just quoted being 

 pretty nearly co terminus with "the bush region" and our next division 

 "the Desert Zone." Elsewhere it can, we think, be shown that Mo- 

 hammedanism is more or less of an exotic it nourishes neither in the 

 Equatorial nor yet in the Temperate regions. 



