362 SYRIAN TOBACCO FIELDS. 
East Africa. Planted at theend of the rains, it an 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 
roduces 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 lbs. 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 Ujiji 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 lbs.” 
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 
@ 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 
