As a cultivator he has complete confidence in Allah. He has never heard of artificial manures, or of the rotation of crops; he rarely troubles to irrigate even when water is available. Here, as all over the Eastern Turkish Empire, there is fertile land for every inhabitant, and to spare. So the Bedouin roams wide with his plough. He crops here this year, and next year tries a patch a few miles away, which has been resting for a season or two under the thin native grasses. His selection made, he appears at dawn one morning, riding on his mournful ass and carrying his plough in front of him. Or perhaps he rides one of his little black oxen and leads the ass; or he may ride either the ass or the oxen and lead a horse or camel. The point is, that he always rides and carries the plough, and that his wife, if she is in attendance, always walks and carries half-a-hundred-weight of something on her head. It is a significant commentary upon his neighbours that he always brings his plough home at night. [Illustration: HARVEST TIME ] [Illustration: PLOUGHING AS OF OLD ] [Illustration: NATIVE STOCK ] [Illustration: THE FRANCISCAN MONASTERY ] [Illustration: LAKE OF TIBERIAS ] In his team he seldom drives two of a kind. It is a cow and a donkey, or a scabby, bony ghost of a pony and a camel. You can yoke them as you please. Palestine is a land that knows no shame, and so the horse does not rebel at being harnessed with a cow. Lazy as he is, the Bedouin is always up at dawn. At dusk he goes to his mat to sleep; he cannot read, and the villages burn no night-lights. Cleverly holding his simple plough upright with one hand, he pelts clods at the team or wields a long goad with the other. Up and down he scratches little gutters a few inches apart, his camel towering ludicrously above his ass. Usually, he sows his seeds in strips before the plough. He rarely harrows and never rolls, but sometimes he shows a sense of the value of fallow by ploughing twice. The rest he leaves to Allah. Sometimes, in the spring, he will pluck the wild turnip and radish and other tares from the growing corn. As a rule he prefers to sit in his coloured rags in the pleasant sunshine. Or he may go off to Jaffa with his asses and his women, and traffic in oranges. Then you see him, with both asses and women brutally overloaded, goading the donkey, or perhaps astride behind the burden of fruit, as the little long-eared slave totters along the tracks. The women, like the asses, never protest. The man is master. It is the way of the East.