(ckigk) fixed in the water. In autumn when the plant known as wild-ass-tail1 has come to maturity, flowered and seeded, people take 10-20 loads (of seed?) and 20-30 of green branches {gfck-shibak) to some head of water, break it up small and cast it in. Then going into the water, they can at once pick up drugged fish. At some convenient place lower down, in a hole below a fall, they will have fixed before-hand a wattle of finger-thick willow-withes, making it firm by piling stones on its sides. The water goes rushing and dashing through the wattle, but leaves on it any fish that may have come floating down. This way of catching fish is practised in Gul-bahar, Parwan and I stall f.
Fish are had in winter in the Lamghanat by this curious device : People dig a pit to the depth of a house, in the bed of a stream, below a fall, line it with stones like a cooking-place, and build up stones round it above, leaving one opening only, under water. Except by this one opening, the fish have no inlet or outlet, but the water finds its way through the stones. This makes a sort of fish-pond from which, when wanted in winter, fish can be taken, 30-40 together. Except at the opening, left where convenient, the sides of the fish-pond are made fast with rice-straw, kept in place by stones. A piece of wicker-work is pulled into the said opening by its edges, gathered together, and into this a second piece, (a-tube,) is inserted, fitting it at the mouth but reaching half-way into it only.2 The fish go through the smaller piece into the larger one, out from which they cannot get. The second narrows towards its inner mouth, its pointed ends being drawn so close that the fish, once entered, cannot turn, but must go on, one by one, into the larger piece. Out of that they cannot return because of the pointed ends of the inner, narrow mouth. The wicker-work fixed and the rice-straw making the pond fast, whatever fish are inside can be taken out ;3 any also which, trying to escape may have gone into the wicker-work,
' qiilan qiiyirughi. Amongst the many plants used to drug fish I have not found
this one mentioned. Khar-zahra and khdr-Jdq approach it in verbal meaning
; the
first describes colocynth, the second, wild rue. See Watts' Economic Prodtuts oj India iii, 366 and Bellew's Notes pp. 182, 471 and 478.
a Much trouble would have been spared to himself and his translators, if Babur had known a lobster-pot.
3 The fish, it is to be inferred, came down the fall into the pond.
