The cultivated variety was grown from off-shoots selected with care, planted out at regular intervals and abundantly irrigated (Ibid.). It began to bear in five or six years and continued productive for sixty or seventy.
Besides the amount of nourishing food furnished and the value of the wood of the date palm, an exhilarating drink was made from its sap and brandy or _lowbgeh_, date wine and vinegar from the fruit without much difficulty.
The fruit of the sycamore (_Ficus sycamorus_) ripens in June. Although it was much esteemed by the ancients, it has been denounced by moderns as insipid.
The mokhayt (_Cardia myxa_) grows to the height of about thirty feet, commencing to branch out at a distance of twelve feet from the ground, with a diameter at the base of about three feet. Its fruit is of a pale yellow color, inclosed in two skins. Its texture is viscous and its taste not very agreeable. It was used extensively as a medicine, and was also, according to Pliny, made into a fermented liquor ("Ex myxis in Aegypto et vina fiunt").
Among other fruit trees and shrubs may be mentioned the fig, pomegranate, vine, olive, peach, pear, plum, apple, carob or locust (_Ceratonia siliqua_), persea, palma, christi or castor oil plant, nebk (_Rhamnus Nabeca_), and the prickly pear or _shok_.
The persea (_Balanite Aegyptiaca_) is a bushy tree or shrub which under favorable circumstances reaches an altitude of eighteen or twenty feet. Its bark is of whitish color, its branches gracefully curved, its foliage of an ashy gray hue. Its lower branches are supplied with long thorns; on its upper branches grows the fruit, which resembles a small date in general character. Its exterior consists of a pulpy substance of subacid flavor; its stone is large for the size of the fruit, and incloses a kernel of yellowish-white color and an oily, rather bitter flavor. Both the exterior and the kernel were eaten.
The nebk or _sidr_ is another fruit of the date variety. It was eaten raw, or the flesh, detached from the stone, was dried in the sun. It enjoyed the reputation of being a sustaining as well as agreeable article.
The most common fig was that known to the Romans as "cottana," and by the modern Arabs as "qottaya."