are often muzzled with sacking.[147] Their drivers follow them up with a kind of basket on the end of a pole to catch the manure and prevent its falling into the grain. When threshing begins the heap of stalks and heads may be four feet high and fifteen or more feet across. Midday is the best time for threshing, as the stalks are then brittle. When thoroughly ground and beaten by the hoofs of the threshing animals the heap may be but a foot deep. When the process of threshing is completed the resulting mixture of chaff and grain is tossed into the air so that the wind may carry off the chaff,[148] while the heavy grain falls directly under the fan or wooden fork which the laborer is using. The women then sift and clean the grain with different grades of sieves[149] and the men put it into sacks. Another more thorough sifting and cleaning is necessary before it is ground. The chopped straw, called _tibn_, is used as a fodder for animals. Some of the worst of the refuse is burned in the ovens. The fine dust-like chaff, called _mûṣ_, is also swept up and used in a mixture with clay with which the roofs are covered. A camel-load of wheat-tibn, two huge sacks, may cost from fifteen piasters to twenty-three according to cleanness and the size of the sacks. The lowest price that we ever paid was thirteen and one-half piasters. This is the Jerusalem market piaster, which equals about three and four-sevenths cents. The great wheat-field of the country continues to be the Haurân, east of the Sea of Galilee. From that region caravans of camels bring the sacked wheat into Western Palestine as far south as Jerusalem. The local wheat supply is entirely inadequate for the needs of the large villages, to say nothing of the cities, and must be supplemented from the fields of Esdraelon, the Maritime Plain, the Ghôr and the Haurân. When quarantine cuts off district from district, as in cholera times, the suffering is considerable. The ordinary country store-place for grain is a cemented cistern underground. Lentils, kursenneh and chick-peas, _ḥummuṣ_, are subjected to threshing in a way similar to that in which wheat and barley are treated. ----- -----