- You cannot add "Mithras: The Invincible Sun God of Persia and the Conquering God of Rome" to the cart because the product is out of stock.
The Land of the Date (Folios Archive Library)
C.M. Cursetjee
£30.00
“A date palm shooting up fifty feet and more with its canopy of waving, bristle-pointed leaves, its spathe gemmed with thousands of blossoms and its fruit hanging in golden clusters, rivalling the apples of Hesperides, is a lovely sight to behold; ‘a vision of delight’ indeed. The date-tree, besides furnishing its abundant fruit so valuable as human food, affords materials for a score and more of domestic uses. It is thus well pronounced to be the most useful product of the vegetable kingdom. A veritable boon and blessing in these desert-bound lands of the date.” At the end of 1916, Cursetjee Manockjee Cursetjee, a retired judge, set out from Bombay on a journey to the Persian Gulf. Despite the fact that he was nearly seventy and Basra was still considered a war zone at the time, being the main base for the British campaign in Mesopotamia, he was not deterred from making the trip. It is a cheerful, charming, rather naive narrative with much of interest, providing a lively picture of the major ports on both sides of the Gulf. He took an interest in everything that he saw: the technique of loading ships, fisheries, the pearl-trade, commerce in the bazaars, architecture, food and, naturally, date cultivation, and describes them with almost boyish enthusiasm. This is an entertaining, instructive and far-sighted account of the Gulf in the earlier part of the 20th century.