Flocks (here termed _chang_) of goats and sheep are pastured in vast numbers in the desert. It is asserted that the goat can subsist without water from the month of Karttik to the middle of Chait, the autumnal to the spring equinox [329]—apparently an impossibility: though it is well known that they can dispense with it during six weeks when the grasses are abundant. In the _thals_ of Daudputra and Bhattipo, they remove to the flats of Sind in the commencement of the hot weather. The shepherds, like their flocks, go without water, but find a substitute in the _chhachh_, or buttermilk, after extracting the butter, which is made into _ghi_, and exchanged for grain, or other necessaries. Those who pasture camels also live entirely upon their milk, and the wild fruits, scarcely ever tasting bread. =Shrubs and Fruits.=—We have often had occasion to mention the _khair_ or _karil_; the _khejra_, whose pod converted, when dried, into flour, is called _sangri_; the _jhal_, which serves to hut the shepherds, and in Jeth and Raisakh affords them fruit; the _pilu_, used as food;[8.2.65] the _babul_, which yields its medicinal gum; the _ber_, or jujube, which also has a pleasant fruit; all of which serve the camel to browse on, and are the most common and most useful of the shrubs: the _jawas_, whose expressed juice yields a gum used in medicine; the _phog_, with whose twigs they line their wells; and the alkaline plant, the _sajji_, which they burn for its ashes. Of these, the first and last are worthy of a more detailed notice. The _karil_, or _khair_ (the capparis, or caper-bush), is well known both in Hindustan and the desert: there they use it as a pickle, but here it is stored up as a culinary article of importance. The bush is from ten to fifteen feet in height, spreading very wide; there are no leaves on its evergreen twig-like branches, which bear a red flower, and the fruit is about the size of a large black currant. When gathered, it is steeped for twenty-four hours in water, which is then poured off, and it undergoes, afterwards, two similar operations, when the deleterious properties are carried off; they are then boiled and eaten with a little salt, or by those who can afford it, dressed in ghi and eaten with bread. Many families possess a stock of twenty maunds.