or black lambskin cap—if they can afford it, otherwise a small round skullcap of compressed white felt. All is dingy, ragged, and tattered ; red patches are sewed with coarse thread over holes in the blue coats, which at the bottom are torn into fringes and rags by age and wear.
Now and then I obtained a slight insight into their daily occupations. The women sit winding and twisting yarn over a charkh or spinning-wheel ; they bake bread on an upturned pitcher vessel with fire beneath it ; they mend clothes, dandle their babies, or play with their older children and search for vermin in one another's wigs—very good sport which does not involve the least danger of exterminating the game. They must have a very wearisome life, one day like another ; but they know nothing better, have no wants, and see their sons grow up to be camel herdsmen and tillers of the ground, struggling for existence on the margin of the desert.
Most of the men's time is taken up by the camels, which are led out to the pastures and driven home in the evening, unless they are so far away that their owners camp out beside them. In the village they look after the canal, keep its channel in order, and take care that the hauz or darn is at the correct level necessary for an equal distribution of the water over the fields. On these there is already a tinge of green, the growing crop, living germs themselves essential to life, which are conjured out of the arid soil of Ahriman as soon as it comes into contact with the precious and scanty water.
Here wheat and barley are cultivated, Jerusalem artichokes, onions, green vegetables, roots, etc., and cotton, the latter in such quantities that it is " shipped off" to Anarek ; just as we arrived some camels laden with cotton were leaving for that town. We were therefore able to increase our store of pambedaneh orpembeluk, as cottonseed is called here. In the tracts where saxaul and tamarisk grow are erected kilns (maden) to produce charcoal, which is sold for a tuman, or 3s. 7d., a camel load.
Chupunun consists of io houses and households with 5o inmates all told. In the form and on the site we found the village, it was only two years old (built in 1903), for
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