XII. The Threshing and the Threshing-Floor

At the time of reaping the fields the husbandman must use great diligence, carting meanwhile the stacked sheaves of reaped wheat to the threshing-ground. This labor is much lightened if the cart-roads have been leveled and made ready beforehand; for it is well known that every spring, from the abundant rains and from the places where water runs over, freshet-gullies open across the roads and become a great hindrance to the passage of the carts. Mark and see, Tornik, how heedless the village people is: when those natural roads are spoiled, only then does it think to open the line of some other new road, whereby the old natural road falls waste. And if the new road be long and full of windings, that is no care of his; for the villager knows not how to reckon the loss of time, let alone the hardships. Hence great hardship comes upon the husbandman's labor, unless year by year at the least the ruined chief roads are repaired. While the harvest is not yet brought in, the preparing of the threshing-ground is a very weighty matter, with the implements needful for threshing — the threshing-sledge, the jarjar, and the rest. In the provinces lying east and north of Van there are many villages that never need to prepare a threshing-ground at all; for close by the villages are thick, short-growing meadows, covering the face of the earth like a green-decked carpet — such are the threshing-grounds of our village of Archak, which are natural and want no preparing. Do you see, Tornik, when the strewn sheaves have been threshed, how clean and unmixed our wheat-heaps are — neither soil nor stone in them? But on those threshing-grounds which are bare, growthless earth, the husbandman is bound every year at threshing-time to build and make ready. He digs over the face of the floor and lets water onto it; the uneven places he levels with the spade and trues the surface of the ground; when the water has dried they strew straw upon it, and fall to beating and smoothing it with the back of the spade. Threshing-floors made in this fashion turn out rough and pitted even so, and the wheat is not kept free of the sandy soil. The best threshing-floor is that which is flagged with stone once for all, and has round about it a raised rim at least half a cubit high, so that the cart bearing the sheaves halts at its edge and does not come onto the floor; for the cart's wheels spoil the floor's bed.

The manner of threshing the strewn sheaves in our villages of Van, and the implements, are good enough: working the threshing-sledge and the jarjar together, they do great work. The better thresher and shredder is the jarjar implement, which is a wooden roller two cubits long, whereon sharp iron adze-blades are set row upon row in a spiral; turning wheel-wise, it breaks up the strewn sheaves of the floor. Above all when horses are yoked to the jarjar, turning swiftly it does far more work than the threshing-sledge.

Ask, Tornik, how the poor villagers do their threshing, who have none of these implements. Eh, Tornik, that question is idle: seeing the poor man is no landholder to begin with, how should he plow and sow? But look — there is the threshing-floor of our village's poor Ghazar, who in his time was the first rich hamban of the village, and now has scarce a few cart-loads of wheat to thresh. One ox he has and one cow, yoked to a worn, toothless threshing-sledge, and with it he threshes his poor little floor. I have known poor Ghazar this long while, who once was a village headman, his door standing open; and now he is come to this pass: fields and orchards alike the creditor seized — whether justly or unjustly I know not; this only I know, that the creditor, both before the law of the world and before his own conscience, held himself blameless, and recited these lines of the poet:

I have told you this thing by the way, Tornik, that you may beware of running into debt; else you too will become a poor Ghazar.

You have not seen it, Tornik, but I have seen it in Bolis¹ — let me tell you. The artificer men of Europe have now invented a machine for threshing, and a prodigious thing it is: set like a great wagon upon four wheels, wherein are fitted divers teeth of iron wire, fine and coarse, and other threshing and shredding blades, past the understanding of peasants like us. This machine turns by fire; two men stand upon the machine's top and without cease, unbinding the sheaves, feed them in through the mouth of the hopper; and the sheaves, broken small, are driven out through the machine's two openings, the wheat by one and the straw by the other. This machine is always stationed close beside the stacks, since it may easily be drawn like a cart and carried wherever you will.

Do you see, Tornik, how greatly science has eased men's labor? That which we thresh at for months — and often our floors are caught under the snows, and we wait besides upon the soft-breathing winds, that winnowing we may lift the wheat clear of the straw, and pass it twice through the horsehair sieves, and all the rest — all that month-long work of ours the machine finishes in a few days. And it sifts the wheat so clean that a man marvels how the stones, the soil, and the stranger grains are parted wholly to one side; so that there is no further need to clean the wheat over again with sieves, and only then carry it to the water-mill to be ground.

Do you know, Tornik, how the villagers hasten at the autumn threshing, to gather in the floors before the season of rains sets in? For at threshing-time the husbandman wants no rain, but only sun and a favoring wind. But this machine's great serviceableness is this, that it can work in every season.

For this cause the great farm-masters of Europe keep their wheat unthreshed a long while in stacks, and when need comes, bringing the machine before the stack, they thresh. For it is proved by trial that wheat keeps better a long time in the stacks, in its own ears and husks, than in the granary — where it often heats and grows weevily, if you do not now and then turn it over with mixing. Our poor threshing-floors have no need of a machine: our machine is the arms of hard-toiling labor. Could we indeed bring that costly machine to our country, when a single one is worth a thousand liras? As I have said many times over, the husbandry-labors of Europe have been made very easy for the village people. The villager has no need to get a machine of his own; for there are companies of the kind that work such machines of set purpose, and the villager, paying only the hire, has the whole of his wheat-stacks threshed. And do you know with what ease that unwieldy machine is carried from village to village, two horses only being yoked to it, thanks to the leveled, well-made roads? Who knows — surely a time is coming, and a day, when that machine shall come walking into our country; I shall die, and you will see it, and remember your Papik's prophecy.

Bringing to an end the lesson of the threshing and the threshing-ground, I must now speak on the preparing of the granary, which is a weighty matter for the husbandman.