After the season the vines should be pruned and the vineyards plowed and dug over, once in early and once in late winter.[150]
In vineyards and fig-orchards one will notice the stone huts called _ḳaṣr_,[151] plural _ḳuṣûr_. Between seasons, when they are not in use, they swarm with hungry fleas. Near each of them is a tiny sunken pit, walled on three sides, which makes a little fireplace. A similar pocket makes a hiding-place for dry figs which are left here under slight pressure beneath a flat stone. The latter place is made to look like the ground about by covering with small stones so as to mislead thieves. Such a hiding-place is called a _mikhba_. Most of the fig crop is dried for later use. The smaller varieties are most suitable for this purpose. The fruit is picked into small baskets and spread out on the ground. Sometimes the fruit is crushed by the hand to hasten the drying.
The olive crop is ready late in the autumn. The trees are beaten[152] with long poles by the men, while women and children gather up the berries from the ground. Seldom is care exercised to select and sort the best of the berries. They are piled in heaps inside the house, where they often become heated through, thus producing an inferior quality of oil. The berries are first put into a circular stone bed, where they are crushed, seed and all, by a sort of millstone set on edge and run like a wheel around a central pivot by a shaft. The crushed mass is then put into gunny sacking or coarse baskets and carried to the press. The oil-presses have always been very primitive, bungling affairs, but of late iron screws are being introduced.
When the grapes have all been picked from a vineyard the sheep and goats[153] are turned in to eat the leaves from the vines. The flocks are allowed to feed in the wheat and barley-fields, also, after the harvest. Goats and sheep are very often seen together in flocks.[154] Their keepers, who are their inseparable companions through the day, take care to secure safe folds for them at night. A party of us were at Teḳûa on the 30th of December, 1902. After examining the ruins we turned our attention to the modern aspect of the place. The caves and recesses about the ruins were used by shepherds, who were living there and caring for large flocks. As the sheep and goats came home late in the afternoon, the little lambs and kids, whose tender days forbade their accompanying their mothers to pasture, were hungrily awaiting them. There were about sixty of these young ones skipping about. When the plaintive cries of the little ones were answered by the motherly calls of the returning elders there was considerable excitement and motion on both sides, until by some mysteriously hidden sense families were united and all was quiet again as supper progressed. A few days later, on our way in from Mâr Sâbâ, we saw the newborn of the flocks in the desert places where animals were browsing. The shepherd usually carries the newly-born in from the fields.[155] Very rarely is one missed. Once, in the valley called Wâdy el-‛Ayn, between eṭ-Ṭayyibeh and Dayr Dîwân, I traced a little kid by its bleat, and seeing no flock about carried it home in my saddle-bags, hoping to rear it; but, missing the peculiar quality of the new milk of its mother, it did not survive many hours. Sometimes, in order to curb the inordinate appetite of a young kid for the milk, the shepherd puts a little bit in its mouth, made by two pencil-like sticks and secures the ends by cords crisscrossed over the sprouting horns.