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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    to the air. When the right season arrives, the rice-fields are flooded by opening sluices at various points along the river banks. The hard clods very soon give way and become loosened as the water soaks through them ; then the next operation begins. This consists in going over the whole surface of the field, and breaking and crumbling up the clods and reducing them to a thick mud. Often in country places oxen are employed for this work. These are simply turned loose into the field and driven about by men or boys, hither and thither, backwards and forwards, and round and round, until all the clods have disappeared. This is very hard work for the poor animals ; but their drivers seem to enjoy it, as, bespattered with mud from head to foot, and with no clothes but a small cloth round the loins, they hoot and yell, and make the hillsides echo with their shouts. The ground is now ready for planting out the young rice. These little rice-plants, now about a foot in length, are pulled up by hand- fuls from the ground where they have been growing, the earth is all shaken away from the roots, and they are then bound up in bundles and carried off to the fields where they are to be planted. When I speak of fields, you must not picture such fields as we see in England with high hedgerows surrounding them, for the only division between the little rice-plots is a small bank, or raised mound of earth, generally only about two feet high and a foot wide. It is a very interesting sight to see a company of women and girls at work planting out the rice. Standing almost knee-deep in the muddy water, they hold a bundle of rice plants in their left hand, and bending nearly double, rapidly take them one by one and push their roots down into the deep mud ; a quick worker in this way will plant over a hundred and fifty a minute. {See picture on page 163.) His rice being thus planted out, the husbandman has little else to do but wait for its growth and ripening ; for beyond an occasional clearing out of grass and weeds he takes no more trouble about it, but leaves the summer rains and sunshine to do their work. Sometimes in seasons of heavy rain the swollen rivers burst their banks, and acres