(3) Along the east shore of the Adriatic is a warm coast called Dalmatia, shel tered by the Dinaric Alps. This region, though fa mous for the beauty of its steep mountain landscapes and for its rich gardens, is not so easily reached as is the Riviera, and therefore is not so much visited.
(4) Other strange little areas of warm lands lie along the south slopes of the Caucasus and the Crimean Mountains, north of the Black Sea. The Crimea is as far north as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Augusta, Maine, but the high mountain wall' to the north and the sea to the south give it such a warm winter that it has a heavy export of oranges, figs, and pomegranates.
549. Desert winds.—The Mediterranean Region has one trouble that does not come so often to California. It has the desert wind. From the great desert of the Sahara a hot wind, called the sirocco, may sometimes blow for two or three days at a time. It dries up the crops in Spain and Italy. On the island of Madeira, off the coast of North Africa, this wind is called rate (the east), and it has been known to bring ruin to the grape crop of that populous little island.
550. Climate and men. — We have seen that the Med iterranean Region has a rainy winter and spring and a dry summer. How do people live in such a country? We shall see many ways in which this climate decides what man must do.
551. Mediterranean food.—The common est meal in America is bread and butter, .meat, and potatoes. The commonest meal in the Mediterranean region consists of bread, olive oil, beans, and some green vegetables. We have already found (Sec. 133) that the winter rain suits wheat and barley well. Therefore the hills and plains in the moister, northern parts are green with wheat in the spring, and yellow with its harvest in early summer. In the drier southern parts barley, which looks much like wheat, but needs less rain, often takes the place of wheat as a crop.
As this whole region has many people to the square mile (table, p. 278), the need for bread has made them work very hard to raise grain. They sometimes grow grain in most difficult places, even in little patches of ground on mountainsides where the plow cannot go, and where the ground must be broken up with a spade or a fork. At har
vest the grain is cut with a sickle, and car ried down the mountain on the backs of men or donkeys. In spite of all this labor, no part of the Mediterranean lands except North Africa produces enough wheat for the bread it needs. Does corn, the great forage grain of America, grow well in the Mediterranean climate? (Sec, 203.) We can now see that people in these countries have hard work to get enough to eat. Animals cannot get corn, as animals do in the United States, or potatoes, as they do in Germany. Then, too, the population is so dense that the small farms must be used to raise food for men instead of food for animals. Therefore, not having animals, instead of meat people eat many varieties of beans, some of which are unknown to us in the United States. Many different kinds of vegetables are abundantly produced.
552. pounding sound one often hears in the towns of these countries is not made by the carpenter. Someone is pound ing a hard, dried codfish from Norway or Newfoundland, getting it ready to cook. Because dried codfish keeps well in hot weather it is a very important food in Mediterranean countries, where there is so little meat. On the Atlantic coasts of Spain and Portugal, quanti ties of sardines are caught. Enough sardines are packed each year at the port of Vigo for every person in the United States to have a box.
553. Irrigation. — In the Mediterranean Region one often hears a creaking sound. It is the noria, a simple machine by means of which a donkey, walking in a circle, lifts water from a well or cistern. This water is used to irrigate a little patch of ground so that vegetables may grow in the dry summer. The Bible, which was written in parts of the Mediterranean region, often speaks of wells and cisterns, and tells of watering the gardens.
Irrigation is greatly needed in all this region, but in only a few places is there water enough for a large area. One of these places is at Granada, in southern Spain. Granada is fed by snow water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains. For this reason this old capital of an ancient kingdom in Spain has, for centuries, been famous for its rich crops.