Understand this well, Tornik. Soil on its own can grow nothing and increase nothing unless water and rain come to water it. Left to itself the soil is barren and bears nothing, unless the quickening power of water and rain joins it. The whole wide world is watered by rain, but many places are watered by rain and running water together. Still, you should know that rain and snow have a great advantage. First, coming down from the clouds of the sky, they can water the highest mountains and the plains alike, at the same moment, while the springs that rise out of the ground, the running brooks and the rivers, water only the flat, low-lying plains. And know this too, Tornik. The greatest reservoir of all the water that runs on the face of the earth is made of rain and snow. It collects in the bosom of the earth as if in a storehouse, and then the springs break out of the earth's bosom and turn into brooks and great rivers. Sometimes the water never sinks into the earth at all. It runs down the hillsides over the surface of the ground, and swollen by the pouring rain it rises into a tremendous flood.
I will give you this much and no more, my quick-minded Tornik. Work the rest out for yourself. These two elements, soil and water, join together to give birth to the matchless children of the whole growing world, in their myriad kinds, and to nourish them.
If we take the soil to be the mother's womb that receives the seed, then it is right to call water the father, who gives the soil's womb its drink and makes it fruitful, so that all those boundless, uncountable growing things are born. Now let me turn to the sown fields under irrigation, and to how carefully a field has to be prepared so that it waters easily and drinks its fill. Once the run of spring rains is over, the watered fields naturally begin to go thirsty, and the sign is that they take on a dark green color. Then you know they are parched and want water. If your water is plentiful, open two channels or more at once and share the water out among the other thirsting fields. And keep a close watch on the watermen, to make sure they water the field with care. The water has to reach every part of the field evenly. They must not leave one patch dry and parched, and they must not let the water pool up somewhere else and stand, because that harms the plants too. It also does harm if the water is left to flood out at the lower end of the field, washing the topsoil away and laying the roots bare. Then, oh, the plants are torn up by the roots, pulled out of the mother's bosom, and after that they wilt and dry out.
The fields of our village of Archak were made ready by nature, with no labor at all. They are so even and level that a single waterman can turn a millstream of water onto a field and still keep it in hand, and in one day he waters a kila's worth of ground.1 It is so easy, in fact, that he can work by night too. But an even field is not enough by itself. You also have to draw the right guide-furrows for the lie of the field and throw up banks to turn the water, and that makes the waterman's work easier still.
I do not know, Tornik, whether you have ever looked closely at the fields of the monastery of Varag,2 at how much trouble they have at watering-time, and what day-wages the watermen charge there. Do you know why? First, most of the fields are uneven, all ridge and slope. Second, they water without drawing the guide-furrow. Third, they say the soil is loose and crumbling and will not hold the water, and so on. All of that is part excuse and part prejudice. The bigger reason is that they will not think, and they do not like work. Sloping fields that the water scours can be brought into order little by little with plain ordinary labor, so that they never give this trouble again. I will talk about that separately.
When a farmer has more water than he needs, he should not stop at watering his sown fields. It pays very well to water the dry ground and the stubble-fields too, and the gain there is double. The self-sown grasses come up thick and give the animals pasture, and the field itself feeds on its own grasses, both on the fallen leaves, which rot and turn to dung, and on the very roots, which give it strength. This is why the villagers leave a field fallow for two or three years, so that the soil can build its strength back up. But they do not know what it is that builds it up. It is these grasses that give the field its strength. And this should not surprise you, Tornik. The grain-crops we sow take strength out of the soil, plainly enough, while the soil's own self-sown growth gives strength back instead of taking it.
And along with these self-sown grasses, the water itself has strengthening properties of its own, since it carries who knows what enriching juices in it. I know you, Tornik. You will want to know the natural properties of soil and water. But remember that your Papik is a peasant. He did not come out of a university, ready to explain everything to you like a man of science. You will have to be satisfied with my plain lessons.
Farming needs water badly, and the village that has abundant springs and streams is a fortunate one. Its yield is plainly double. But then there are the villages whose natural springs are few, or whose rivers and streams come down from the heights, run through the plains, and go off to empty into the lakelets or join the great rivers. To the grasslands and the tilled fields those bring no profit at all.
Let me give you an example, Tornik, one lying right in front of your eyes. A river runs through the land between our Archak and the village of Kharakonis. From about the beginning of spring, for more than two months, that river's water runs to waste and empties into the lakelet nearby, and neither we nor the men of that village give a thought to using it, to building small artificial ponds on the upper ground. And how many places we have that nature has shaped for exactly this, lying hollow and cupped! It would be enough to throw up banks of earth around them and build a single sluice-eye of mortared stone at the mouth of the water-channel, then let the river's water in through the spring and hold it there until the time comes to water the fields. Our forefathers had cleverer minds than ours, and more industrious and farsighted ones. In their day they built ponds of exactly this kind, and the ruins of them can still be seen. We cannot even be bothered to repair the ruined ponds. In the ring of mountains east of Van there is a wide valley with myriad springs around it, which run down into the valley's bosom and gather in a lake. In those days the Van country had a good and capable priest who thought about the people's field-water as well as his own office, and he built a dam of mortared stone at the valley's narrow lower mouth and made that lake. The local people call it Keshish Göl for that reason.3 The water of this lake is so plentiful that it waters the fields all around Van, which are very wide, and the newly planted vineyards too. They owe their heavy fruitfulness to that priest's great work. Along with the farming of souls he saw to the farming of bread as well. His name has not come down to us, but the people bless him to this day for the memorial of what he did. There are many other provinces with great and small rivers running through their plains without giving them a palmful of water, like the Euphrates and the Meghraget in the plain of Mush. Above the river Euphrates you can still see the trace of a great water-channel, cut, they say, long ago by a lord of the land who cared about such things, and it watered a good large part of the plain of Mush. It is a shame that the people cannot be troubled to dig that great channel out, open it, and water the many fields left dry. A river of Paradise4 flows right past them. Does it begrudge its water to the people born and living along its banks? No. The people are idle and slack. They want everything made for them. The rain falls from the sky, so the rivers' water should run on its own and water their fields for them. God in his care has prepared a great deal for man in advance, but he has left a small share of the labor to us too, so that the sentence he laid down as Lord, and will not revoke, is carried out, and man has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.
You know, Tornik, how much water matters to village people, and you have seen the quarrels and fights that break out when the fields are watered. Even blood gets mixed with the water. That is why I wanted to be free of those dreadful fights. Working alone, with my own hands, I made two small ponds for our fields, and they are enough for us. And I give you this charge from now on, Tornik. Work always to keep the banks of those ponds solid, and repair the places where the water wears through at the end of every autumn. Do that and you will give your fields plenty of water and reap a plentiful yield, you will stay clear of the villagers' brutal quarrels, and at the same time you will set your village neighbors a useful example, so that they follow it and every master of a house works to make ponds like these for his own fields. The gain comes in more ways than one, because these artificial ponds do more than supply the fields with water. The pond-beds turn to meadow, grow thick grass, and become green pasture for the animals as well. There are many more ways of building water-stores, but this much is enough. Now I turn to the dividing and ordering of the fields, a very important matter, and one that hangs together with this lesson.
Notes
- The kila is an Ottoman grain-measure. A kila of ground is the plot sown with one kila of seed. ↩
- Varag is the monastery on Mount Varag near Van, of which Khrimian ("Hayrik") was abbot, and where Papik served as plowman (see Chapter I). ↩
- Keshish Göl means "the Priest's Lake" in Turkish. It is the great reservoir in the mountains east of Van, whose waters served the gardens and fields around the city. ↩
- The Euphrates is counted among the four rivers of Eden (Genesis 2:14). ↩