Vol. XXI, No. 7 



WASHINGTON 



July, 1910 



/TTl 



THE 



®(SIRAIPIHII1€ 



THE DATE GARDENS OF THE JERID 



By Thomas H. Kearney 



With Photographs by the Author 



WITH its feet in the water and 

 its head in the fire," as the 

 Arab proverb has it, the date 

 pahii is at home in the vast deserts that 

 stretch from Morocco to tlie borders of 

 India. 



It thrives where the air is almost abso- 

 lutely dry and where the summer tem- 

 peratures are the highest on the globe. 

 Under these conditions only do the best 

 varieties of dates reach perfect ripeness. 

 But as it is also necessary that the roots 

 of the palm find plenty of moisture in the 

 soil, the fruit is confined to the oases — 

 favored spots in the deserts where never- 

 failing springs or wells allow of irriga- 

 tion. 



No country is more celebrated for the 

 excellence of its dates than the Beled el 

 Jerid(Land of the Palms), a small group 

 of oases situated at the northern edge of 

 the Sahara and distant about 250 miles 

 southwestward as the crow flies from the 

 city of Tunis. 



Some years ago I visited these oases 

 in order to obtain palms for the date or- 

 chards which the National Department 

 of Agriculture has established in Arizona 

 and in the Colorado Desert of Califor- 

 nia.* My visit was so timed that I 



* Tn the southwestern United States there are 

 deserts as hot as the Sahara. Rivers and arte- 



reached the oases soon after the begin- 

 ning of the harvest. This made it pos- 

 sible to test the fruit of the different 

 varieties while fresh from the trees and 

 to select the best of them for introduc- 

 tion into the United States. 



The Jerid is best reached by means of 

 a railway which crosses southern Tunis 

 from the busy little seaport of Sfax, on 

 the east coast, to the rich phosphate mines 

 of Metlaoui, near the Algerian frontier. 



Leaving Sfax one morning in October, 

 an all-day journey in a slow mixed train 

 brought me to Gafsa, 25 miles from the 

 end of the line. It was a desolate coun- 

 try through which we passed, wonder- 

 fully like the high plains of eastern Colo- 

 rado and New Mexico. 



An occasional cluster of ''gourbis," or 

 tents of skins, an occasional flock of 

 multicolored sheep and goats, tended by 

 half- wild Bedouin children, were the 

 only signs of life in the monotonous 

 landscape. The vegetation consisted 



sian wells supply water for the irrip^ation of 

 many thousands of acres. In the belief that 

 the physical conditions meet all the require- 

 ments of the palm, the Department of As-ricul- 

 ture is devoting much energy to establishing 

 date culture in this region. During the past 

 ten years agricultural explorers have visited 

 many parts of the great desert zone of the Old 

 World in search of the best varieties. 



