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There is a beautiful journey from Paris across France southwesterly to the coast, through odd little French villages, vineyards, poppy-fields, and rose-gardens, across shining rivulets and through an undulating landscape, all so lovely that it is no wonder that one expects all this beauty to lead up to a climax. But what a disappointment Dinard is to one's enthusiastic anticipations!
Next morning a crier went through the state proclaiming that there was a log-jam on the river and that it behoved all loyal subjects to remove it. The people poured down from their villages to the moist warm valley of poppy-fields; and the King and I went with them.
Wheat was nearly ready for cutting, and the poppy-fields where, the day previous, the men were making their first incisions for opium, here had yielded their harvest and were fast ripening their seed. Ak-Sheher is beautifully situated at the entrance of a deep gorge in the mountains. It is so buried in its embowered gardens that little, except the mosque, is seen as you approach it.
The march began after we got out of the train at Pathankot, in a hot night among the rice and poppy-fields. It was all new to Adam, and he had opinions to advance notably about a fish that jumped on a wayside pond. "Now I know," he shouted, "how Khuda puts them there. First He makes them and then He drops them down. That was a new one."
In that direction lay the great salt lake of Yuezler, and the strings of camels we met on the road, laden with salt, were returning from it. Ladik is surrounded with poppy-fields, brilliant with white and purple blossoms. When the petals have fallen, the natives go carefully over the whole field and make incisions in every stalk, whence the opium exudes.
The sublimity of the slumber that is death has never been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the supine figure and sleeping features of this most beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream.
Next morning a crier went through the State proclaiming that there was a log-jam on the river and that it behoved all loyal subjects to remove it. The people poured down from their villages to the moist, warm valley of poppy-fields; and the King and I went with them.
Dearer the sight of a shy wild rose by the road-side's dusty way, Than all the splendor of poppy-fields ablaze in the sun of May. Gay as the bold poinsettia is, and the burden of pepper trees, The sunflower, tawny and gold and brown, is richer to me than these; And rising ever above the song of the hoarse, insistent sea, The voice of the prairie calling, calling me.
I went to China too late to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; too late to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the following concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs: "In accordance with instructions received through the Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine ... or instruments for its use, except by foreign medical practitioners and foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited."
But one is beautiful and many-shadowed like a copper vase, and the other is like a winter sunset on the poppy-fields. You remind me of the angry red policeman, and I tremble." "Tremble as much as you like," said Mrs. Sin scornfully, "but do something, think; don't leave everything to me. She screamed tonight and someone heard her. They are searching the river bank from door to door."
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