Do you see it, my sharp-eyed Tornik? The farming of our village people still lies in the swaddling-bands of antiquity. We are still wandering in the old, old centuries. Every task of our farming is a torment of bitter sweat, and the tools we work with are rough, artless, crudely made things that torture not only us but, far more, our poor dumb animals.
Look, here comes the village laborer in from the field, his cart piled with sheaved wheat. He has yoked a pair of strong buffaloes and a pair of oxen, and they drag the cart with such difficulty that half an hour's road takes them a full hour to the threshing-floor. The heartless carter drives the poor buffaloes on with the drover's whip, crack on crack. Tongues hanging out, breathless, snorting, they haul. Come closer, Tornik, and look at that crude, monstrous cart. Measure its length and its width. The whole thing turns in one piece with the axles, and the wheel-block riding on the axle, if we weigh it together with its wheels, comes to more than a hundred litras,1 because it is built entirely of hard elm, the heaviest wood there is. So the cart is an enormous load in itself, and on top of that load they pile a hundred and fifty sheaves of wheat and more.
It is a great comfort to me, Tornik, that you can now see the village people of Van beginning to use the light carts of Karin,2 which make things so much easier for the farmer.
Come along, they are plowing a field just over there, and I will show you Adam's gutan.3 Look at it, one thick, crook-backed beam of ash-wood, more than three cubits long. The villagers of Van call it the esh, the donkey, and it drags every bit as slowly as one. To the back end of this donkey-beam the share-head is joined, and over its head they have fitted the iron share. The gutan of Van breaks the ground with one pair of yoked buffaloes and three pairs of oxen, and the furrows it opens are barely a big span deep. But let me tell you, Tornik, if you saw the gutans of the plain of Mush, of Alashkert, and of the Ararat country, you would be appalled. Nine pairs of fighting buffaloes and oxen can barely work that crude gutan, and the furrow it opens is not much different from the furrow of ours. Several houses of a village have to join together just to yoke a single gutan. Compared with those, our gutans in the villages of Van are far more refined, because our gutan-joiners are very skilled. With the plumb-line they set the gutan so true that at times it walks the line without swerving and opens its furrow. But set it beside the plow of Europe, and our gutan falls behind. Yoke one pair of buffaloes to the European plow, or two pairs of oxen, and it breaks the ground with perfect ease, even unbroken fallow, while our gutan needs four yoke to work it. And do you know, Tornik, what a saving it is in the labor of plowing when we can plow with two yoke instead of four? And how welcome, how profitable that is, above all for the village households that do not own many draft cattle.
I am very glad, Tornik. I heard of it, and I went and saw it myself. There is a skilled and inventive joiner in Van, Usta David4 they call him, who builds plows exactly on the European pattern. There is another craftsman too, a blacksmith named Aleksan, who makes the iron parts of the plow. You only need to show him a model. The villagers around Van have now begun to use that plow, and the price is very low. A plow can be built for three gold pieces. And do you know what a relief it is for a villager, Tornik, to buy his plow ready-made? I know the poor villager. For a gutan, for a cart, for the various other timbers his farming needs, he leaves his work in the field and spends days wandering the tree-gardens of Van looking for suitable wood, and then he is forced to pay a heavy price for it.
If only a workshop opened in Van. If only the skilled joiners and the ironworkers formed a modest company and made in that workshop all the tools that farming needs. Not just the gutan but small plows too, and light carts whose axles turn inside the wheels, and all the gear that belongs to the threshing, the threshing-sledge, the jarjar5 and the rest, the manker,6 the leveling-drag, yokes, and so on. Then you would see, Tornik, what a relief it would be for the farming people. And how well that little company would do, able to supply not just the villagers of Van but the neighboring provinces as well, since the lake of Van makes it so easy to carry farm tools across. If this venture succeeds and the old tools are traded for new, the land's yield will go far forward, and the increase will be doubled, not just for the subject people but for the revenue of the state too, because the flourishing of the land's farming is the wellspring of the state treasury's wealth.
So, Tornik, we must put away the old tools, and with them the old ingrained prejudices, and take up the new tools that craft keeps inventing. For people who have never been taught, that is hard enough. But when people see a working example with their own eyes, the ease of the labor and the profit and earnings that come with it, they take heart at once and set about trying it and learning it. Or do you think our village folk are so dull and stupid that they would see their own profit right in front of their eyes and not lift a hand to take it?
Listen, Tornik, and let me tell you a little story, so you can be sure of this. Whatever brings a profit, people will fight to snatch it out of one another's hands.
The story goes that a Frenchman brought a good quantity of potatoes over from America into France for seed, planted a field of them, and got a great yield. Since his aim was to spread the growing of that useful plant through France, he wanted to give the potatoes from his own field away to the people for nothing. The people thought nothing of it, and perhaps even laughed at him. Now watch what the ingenious farmer does. He asks the government for constables and sets a guard over the potato field. But he secretly instructs the constables that if men slip into the field to steal, the guards are to pretend not to see, and to let them. People see there are guards over the field, and so they say, there must be good things to eat in there. They begin slyly stealing the potatoes. At first they eat them raw, and then they boil them, and they find it is an excellent thing. It tastes like egg, and it nourishes a man well. And that is how the growing of the potato spread, not just through France but through the whole of Europe, and in a time of famine it is a food that saves the people.
Did you see, Tornik, what a masterly trick the clever Frenchman played? He spread his discovery through the whole country of France by the hands of thieves. And not France alone. Today the whole of Europe is busy growing potatoes, and after wheat it is counted the most necessary food there is.
How good it would be if our farming people followed this example too and learned to grow that profitable plant, which yields thirty and forty for one. Then, whenever the wheat crop failed, the potato crop would fill its place, and people would be spared the bitter scourge of famine.
Now that I have talked about the tools of the field, do you know, Tornik, that there are living tools as well, and more important ones? Our yoke-bearing working animals, which grow wearier than we do in the heaviest labor of the fields. But we need to know which of them suits the work best, the ox, the buffalo, or the horse. We usually use the ox and the buffalo, and experience shows us that the gentle-natured ox suits the work better than the buffalo, and makes it far easier.
The buffalo brings the laborer a great deal of trouble and difficulty, above all at the start of spring, when the animals come out of the winter stable grown fat and full of strength. It takes some weeks to tame those fierce, furious creatures before you can bring their proud necks under the yoke. Have you seen what the laborers do to reconcile fighting buffaloes with one another? They have come up with a method so stupid and so brutal that no soft-hearted man can bear to watch the fight. They lead two fighting buffaloes out into the open field and let them go, and then you see with what force head crashes against head, with a tremendous crack. Sometimes the fight ends with one of them taking the first blow, seeing his own weakness, and bolting. Sometimes the two are evenly matched and neither will give way, until one of them has a leg broken or a horn torn out by the root. There is a strange law among these fighters. Once one has proved himself the victor and the other has run, they are at peace with each other from then on, and quietly, side by side, they go under the yoke.
Let us not be surprised, Tornik, that the ignorant villager seals the terms of his buffaloes' peace this way. Isn't the world's law of peace just the same?
But leave that. There is another kind of labor and hardship in keeping the buffalo. Sturdy and thick-hided as buffaloes are, they are actually very delicate and need a great deal of tending. They can bear neither cold nor heat. On a summer day you have to wash them several times, and even in winter you must at least wash them now and then and rub them with oil. And do you know how hard it is to control the buffaloes that never grow tame, the ones that always want to fight and disturb the peace of the others? A laborer has to give himself to such a beast alone and keep guard over it. The villager has just one trick for handling these unruly fighters, and they obey at once. And sometimes the villagers even count it a great boast to own fighting buffaloes, because the peasant folk have their vanity too, in their own measure. How proud our brother Toros is when his buffalo beats the buffalo of Kirakos! And then look at the fight between Toros and Kirakos themselves, above all when some harm has come to the beaten buffalo, a leg broken or a horn knocked off. What comes of it is a grudge, or revenge taken on one another.
It seems to me, Tornik, that it is the heavy, unbearable tools of the field that have given the villagers their reason for using buffaloes at all. Once the tools grow light and easy, there will be no more need of the buffalo. Yes, in the business of stock-raising the buffalo has his uses too, for his hide and his meat. And then there is the horn, out of which the European with his skill makes all sorts of things, handles for knives and clasp-knives, and buttons, while our oil-seller measures out his oil with a horn. And that is the whole of his usefulness.
So it is best, Tornik, that the villagers come to see this and learn to use the ox instead for the steady work. The ox is very easy to keep, summer and winter alike. He needs neither washing nor oiling. It is enough to scrape his back with a currycomb and keep him clean. But the breed of the oxen must be improved, like the oxen of the province of Alashkert, which are splendid and huge. The oxen of our own province of Van are very stunted and weak, and I will explain the reasons for that in their place.
But let me tell you this too, Tornik. Over buffalo and ox alike, the horse has an enormous advantage, if only we knew how to use him in our farm work and could manage it. The villager will laugh, perhaps. He has never seen it, and he cannot believe that the whole world of Europe uses only the horse for its farming, though it keeps oxen beyond counting, and those only for the meat and the hide. Let me tell you the horse's qualities. First, the horse's chest has twice the strength of the ox's neck. Second, the horse is far faster at the work. Figure it this way. If a plow yoked with ox and buffalo opens fifty furrows in a day, the horse-plow will certainly open seventy furrows and more. And for hauling the cart and treading out the sheaves, nothing compares with the horse.
But will the villager ever be persuaded to give up his old inherited system and custom? Yes, Tornik, he will. And yet the villager is in the right too, so long as schooling and the times lend him no hand. Beyond everything else there is his deep-rooted prejudice. Pulling that time-hallowed notion out of his mind takes schooling, and plenty of time.
But should we wait until he is schooled and his mind accepts the new progress? No. As I said before, we must show the village people by working example. Let them see with their own eyes. A man who cannot read or write struggles to grasp a thing in his mind, but through the sight of his eyes and a plain example he grasps it quickly, and the profit of the work drives him to follow the example. In the ages of the old world, when there was no writing, no school and no learning, men learned everything, every craft, from one another by the practice of the eye. Even now our Eastern world learns the plain crafts that same way, smithing, for instance, tailoring, shoemaking, joinery and the rest. The Western world, which has gone ahead of us, first teaches those crafts as lessons in a school, in theory, and when the pupil comes out of the school, he picks up the practical work in the workshop very easily.
Notes
- The litra, an old measure of weight and capacity used in the Van country. ↩
- Karin is the Armenian name of Erzurum. ↩
- Gutan, the great wooden ox-plow of the Armenian highlands, drawn by teams of buffalo and oxen. ↩
- Usta means master craftsman in Turkish. ↩
- Jarjar, a threshing implement drawn over the strewn sheaves, counted with the threshing-sledge among the gear of the threshing-floor. ↩
- Manker, the heavy toothed harrow-beam of the Van country, on which the driver stands as the team drags it. It is described in the next lesson. ↩