The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing.

  • Herbert Standing
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The children of Madagascar / by Herbert F. Standing. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    kinds of rice grown in Imerina will not live except in water or on very damp ground, and so you will sometimes see the water from some spring among the mountains carried along for miles and miles in little channels ingeniously cut along the slopes of the hills, and winding in and out with every turn and bend in the hill-side. When the season for sowing the rice arrives, a small piece of level ground supplied with running water is selected, and this having been dug and worked up into a thin mud, is well manured, generally with the ashes of the dried grass used by the common people as fuel. The rice grains are then thrown broadcast, evenly and thickly over the muddy water. This operation reminds one forcibly of the text, ' Cast thy bread upon the waters.' The rice grains, settling down into the rich mud, quickly sprout and take root, and in a few days send up a forest of bright-green little blades. You can hardly picture the beautiful vivid emerald green of these young rice-plants, its contrast with the bare brown hills around is most refreshing and restful to the eye. The ground for planting out the young rice is meanwhile being prepared. During the long dry months of winter and spring it has caked and cracked and dried up, and looks so hard that you would almost imagine that nothing would ever grow in it again ; but the sharp narrow-bladed spades, with handles like broom-sticks, soon break it up into large rough clods. If the owner is a poor man, he will dig up his own rice-field ; but usually it is the work of slaves. This digging is very hard work, and is generally done by men, though often boys of twelve years and upwards will take their turn at it. Two men generally work side by side, digging round each clod and turning it over together. A very expressive native proverb describes a lazy man as ' seeking for soft ground to stick his spade into,' and another says : ' That lazy fellow is going to borrow a spade, but saying all the time, May I not find one ! ' Often this rough digging over of the rice-grounds is done many weeks before the rice is planted out, and the great clods are sometimes piled up in loose heaps and ridges, in order to be thoroughly exposed