Of food trees the olive is probably the most valuable. It takes ten or fifteen years to bring it to the state of bearing much fruit, but it may go on bearing heavy crops for a century. The oil is freely used in cooking, for salads, for lighting and for anointing. A hard-pressed peasant will occasionally yield to the temptation to cut down some of his olive-trees, selling the finest pieces of wood to the makers of the olive-wood articles[46] which are prized by tourists, and disposing of the rest as fire-wood.[47] A hundredweight of such fire-wood sells for from twelve to twenty-five cents, according to the season and the market, the city price being considerably higher than the country price. A good olive-orchard is a sure source of income, unless the taxes are too harshly and arbitrarily imposed. The cutting them down is a real calamity to the country, but it is done only too frequently in a poor year to avoid taxes. The trunk of an aged olive-tree attains a great girth and a gnarled, knobby look. Sometimes a large part of one of these huge trunks will be quite hollowed out by decay, in which case the peasants often fill up the cavities with a core of stones. The tree goes on bearing with chief dependence on the state of the bark for its healthy condition. The heavy crops and light crops follow each other in somewhat the same relation as the apple crops in our New England country. Women and children gather up those olive berries that fall to the ground early in the season. Whenever it is desired to gather the crop of a tree or orchard the men beat the branches with very long light poles and the women and the children pick up the fallen fruit from the ground. Of course this is a poor way to gather the best olives, but inasmuch as the chief use of the olive in Palestine is to express the oil, it makes less difference. The berries do not ordinarily grow to the larger sizes so often seen in our markets. Perhaps one of the very handsomest stretches of olive-orchards in the East is at what is called the Ṣaḥrâ, near Beirut, between that city and Shwayfât. Other smaller but excellent orchards are to be seen between Bethlehem and Bayt Jâlâ, at Mâr Elyâs, Bîr ez-Zayt and to the south of eṭ-Ṭayyibeh. ----- -----