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These little hill-ponies are wonderfully sure-footed, and can climb like cats over dry water-courses piled with rocks and great boulders, which a man on foot would find difficult to negotiate. The rhododendrons were then in full flower, and the hills were one blaze of colour.
In the midst of this lake there was a tiny island, just big enough to give room for the growth of one gigantic date palm, and for a mass of arum lilies from which it rose towering toward the delicate blue of the cloudless sky. The lilies and the palm they were the island, round which slept greenish-yellow water guarded by the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the bamboos, and the shrubs.
All at once I saw, above me, a rock decked with rhododendrons; these flowers looked like tufts of oleanders through the dark foliage of the fir-trees, and produced a charming effect. I left the path in order to reach them sooner, and when I had gathered a bouquet, I threw my staff and at the same time uttered a joyous cry, in imitation of the students, my companions on this trip.
There are wide gardens and flowery walks. Rhododendrons were flaming red and white, a hedge of gorse shone gold. It was a Roman Catholic school, and now and then a noble Calvary rose out of the flowers. The Abbey watched over the place. Monks in long black robes moved about slowly, magisterially. Gordon went up to one of them and spoke to him shyly. "A wonderful place this, sir."
Rocks abound of the same dolomite kind as on the ridge further south, between the Loangwa and Chambezé, covered, like them, with lichens, orchids, euphorbias, and upland vegetation, hard-leaved acacias, rhododendrons, masukos.
Changachelling temples and chaits crown a beautiful rocky eminence on the ridge, their roofs, cones and spires peeping through groves of bamboo, rhododendrons, and arbutus; the ascent is by broad flights of steps cut in the mica-slate rocks, up which shaven and girdled monks, with rosaries and long red gowns, were dragging loads of bamboo stems, that produced a curious rattling noise.
He looked at the rhododendrons; he looked at the raindrops of the night sparkling in the morning sun; he looked at the birds, and the blue sky, and across the valley to a hillside yellow with gorse.
The ride along the summit of the mountain was a delight, for we passed through grove after grove of rhododendrons in full blossom. The trees were sometimes thirty feet in height and the red flowers glowed like clusters of living coals among their dark green leaves. In the northern part of Yün-nan the rhododendrons grow above other timber line on mountains where it is too high even for spruces.
The moors were purple with heather, touched here and there with the fire of the flaming gorse, the wind blew always from the west, the gardens were ablaze with slowly bursting rhododendrons. Every gleam of coloring, every breath of perfume, seemed to carry him unresistingly back to the days of his boyhood.
It is the fern universal here with us, it makes great swales running out from wood edges to pastures, and it rivals the bayberry in covering hillsides; it will grow in dense beds under tall laurels or rhododendrons, border your wild walk, or make a setting of cheerful light green to the stone wall; while if cut for house decoration, it keeps in condition for several days and almost rivals the Maidenhair as a combination with sweet peas or roses.
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