IO PERKY, Terraced Cultivation and Irrigation. 



but mainly on their northern side. As many as forty 

 terraces, one above and behind the other, are to be found 

 on any one hill. Most of these have earth behind them, 

 but from the inner sides of some the soil has in the course 

 of time been washed away. They have retaining walls, 

 and most probably were used for horticultural purposes. 

 Hill terraces also cover a small area as far south as 

 Swaziland." 24 



Irrigated terraces are also found in Madagascar. 

 " The chief employment of the Malagasy is agriculture. 

 In the cultivation of rice they show very great ingenuity, 

 the ketsa grounds, where the rice is sown before trans- 

 planting, being found in either on the margins of streams 

 or in the hollows of the hills in a series of terraces, to 

 which water is often conducted for a considerable distance. 

 In this agricultural engineering no people surpass the 

 Betsileo." 25 Arabia is a place where terrace irrigation is 

 and has been carried out on a huge scale. The Saracens 

 who entered Spain, "had come from the severest training- 

 school in all Eurasia. Where the arid tableland of Arabia 

 is buttressed on the south-western front by high coast 

 ranges (6,000 to 10,500 feet or 2,000 to 3,000 metres) in 

 Yemen, rich in its soil of disintegrated trap rock, 

 adequately watered by the dash of the south-west 

 Monsoon against its towering ridges, but practically the 

 whole country is atilt. Consequently the mountains have 

 been terraced from the base often up to 6,000 feet." 



" The country presents the aspect of vast agricultural 

 amphitheatres, in which the narrow paths of ancient 

 paving zigzag up and up through successive zones of 

 production. . . . The terrace walls are from five to 



24 Hall, "Stone Forts and Pits on the Inyanga Estate, Rhodesia." 

 Jour I. Roy. A nth. Inst., XXXV., 1905. 



25 "Encyclop. Britt.,' ; Xlth Edition, XVII., p. 274. 



