66 BULLETIN 1457, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
10 feet of %-inch or 1-inch best manila rope an eye-splice should be 
made into the left-hand ring of the cinch, and the free end should be 
well wrapped to prevent fraying. To the other end of the cinch 
should be attached a heavy iron snap, such as is used on the breast 
straps of wagon harness, the tongue of the snap toward the outside. 
Three or four trace-chain open links should be fastened about 8 
inches apart into the outer end of the manila rope and closely closed. 
The common harness rings are too fragile to be trusted with a man's 
weight. A light strap or thong fastened to either cinch ring and 
passed in front of the shoulders and back of the neck should be of 
the proper length to keep the girdle in the most convenient position 
across the back. Putting on the girdle and throwing the rope 
around the tree trunk, the operator catches the free end in his right 
hand and, testing it for convenient length for climbing, slips one of 
the links into the snap. 
To place the feet against the leaf bases and support the body with 
the girdle against the back is simplicity itself; but to throw the 
weight of the body off the girdle and get slack enough on the rope 
to permit its upward flip on the opposite side of the tree is accom- 
plished only with practice. The photograph shown in Plate 13, Z>, 
taken at Indio, Calif., in January, 1924, represents probably the 
first attempt at date-tree climbing by the Egj^ptian method ever 
made in America. 
LANDSCAPE VALUE OF THE DATE PALM 
To one who has traveled in the date-growing regions of the Old 
World, the landscape effect of the date palms is one of the first 
impressions received and one that grows with every day spent in the 
region. Young palms before the age of trunk elongation begins 
haA^e a certain artistic beauty derived from the crown of outcurving 
pinna? leaves, and as fruiting begins this is enhanced by the beauty of 
the heavy clusters of brilliantly colored fruit seen against the back- 
ground of gray-green foliage. 
But it is only with advancing years that the real dignity and 
beauty of the date palm, which cause it to be the dominating fea- 
ture of any landscape, are established. Even then the date palm 
is at its best only in groups or groves. Singly, its trunk is too slender 
to give the impression at once of grace, of beauty, and of strength. 
A single architectural shaft or column is exceedingly difficult to design, 
needing the nicest balance in proportions of shaft, capital, base, and 
pedestal to give the idea at once of beauty and stability; yet the 
simplest columns in groups or colonnades at once support one another 
in producing the most beautiful effect. So a single old palm with its 
slender trunk, often out of perpendicular, and its lack of base is apt 
to give an impression of precariousness and lack of balancing. 
But groups or regular rows supporting one another in a colonnade 
effect give a most pleasing impression. At the ^ame time tall de- 
tached palms among broad-leaved trees and shrubs or among build- 
ings give a note of picturesque beauty which nothing else affords. 
Whatever the situation — whether in city parks, in villages, along 
wide alluvial bottoms, or in groves around some group of desert 
springs — the date palm dominates the landscape. It sounds the key- 
