The harvest of wheat and barley is cut with the sickle, the whole crop being cast pell-mell in a heap in the centre of the field, perhaps some twenty feet high; there it is allowed to lie for a month, or till it is convenient to the owner to extract the grain. This is done by laying round the heap a small quantity of straw with the ear on, and going over it with a kind of car made with heavy beams and running on rollers fitted with sharpened edges of iron; a boy rides on this, and, with a rope and a stick, guides a pair of oxen, or a mule and a horse, or a mule and a donkey, which draw this very primitive machine. As the straw gets broken, more is added, and the broken straw and ears dragged to the side with the grain entangled among them; the weather being very dry, the grain generally all falls out ere this crushing process commences. The straw is in this way crushed into pieces some two or three inches long. When the whole heap has been gone over, the farmer waits for a windy day; when it comes, he tosses the heap in forkfuls in the air. The cut straw is carried a yard or two, and the grain being heavier falls straight to the ground and is removed: the straw is now termed “kah,” and is stored; it is the ordinary fodder of the country, hay being seldom used, save by the rich. It is also useful as a packing material and to make the “kah-gil” (“gil,” clay), a kind of plaster with which all houses, save those built of burnt bricks, are smeared, and with which all roofs in Ispahan, Teheran, and Shiraz are carefully coated: it is not until Ghilān, on the Caspian shore, is reached that we come to tiled roofs. Mud bricks are also made with mud and old or spoiled kah. It is doubtless for this that the Jews desired _straw_ of the Egyptians to make their bricks. Sheep are never fed on clover _in sitû_, it is considered too precious (it is cut and dried in twists some two yards long); but they are, however, allowed to graze on the stubble of wheat and barley, and so manure the land. The greater part of the country is irrigated (save near the Caspian, where the water is in such excess that men may be seen ploughing up to their knees in it); consequently the fields are made up into small squares or parallelograms by trenches raised with the spade; these parallelograms run on each side of a small trench, from which the water is admitted, and as fast as one is opened and filled from the trench, it is stopped, and water admitted to another, and so on until the whole field is thoroughly soaked. Of course it is impossible to ride over a recently watered field, as, if the soil is light, one’s horse is soon up to his girths. Land in Persia is of value according to the quantity of water it is entitled to, and the great cost of a crop is usually not the amount of labour bestowed or the rent paid, but the quantity of water purchased.