The Former Full Of Fruit-Trees;
Such As Orange, Lemon, Fig, Pomegranate, Apple, Pear, And Cherry
Trees.
The scene became every moment more interesting.
As we
advanced, the country assumed a variety almost indescribable. The
contrast was every where infinitely striking. At one instant the eye
was presented with fine corn-fields, meadows, and high hills; nay,
mountains, cultivated to the very summits, are covered with immense
flocks of sheep, and herds of cattle; while the vallies conveyed to
the imagination an idea of the fertile plains of Arcadia; the simple
manners of the Moors, who tend these flocks and herds, still further
inducing one to believe them the happy, peaceful people, the poets
feign the Arcadian swains to have been. On the other hand are huge
mountains, bleak and barren, inaccessible to man, and scarcely
affording food to the straggling wild goats that venture to browse on
them.
There is a degree of simplicity in the behaviour of the peasants, so
widely different from these who inhabit the towns, that it is
impossible to suppose them the same race of men. From the great
affinity between the manners and customs of these country Moors, and
the _Scenite Arabs_, the inhabitants of _Arabia Deserta_, we may
naturally infer that they must have derived those habits from the
latter.
They reside in villages composed of tents to the number of forty or
fifty, which they remove at pleasure; when the pasture fails in one
valley, they strike their tents, and seek another, where they remain
till the same necessity impels them to quit that in its turn.
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