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But to return to tea. Our bungalow was of the usual type, consisting of cement floor, roof of crossed bamboos and two feet of sun-grass thatch, supported by immense teak posts, hard as iron and bidding defiance to the white ants. The walls were of mats. These teelahs were always carefully terraced to prevent the wash of soil and permit cultivation.
So saying, they turned together into the large terraced garden. While they were engaged in walking over the handsome grounds which surrounded "The Indian Nest," Rondeau, who had accompanied his master, was differently occupied.
The picture of charming houses and beautiful terraced gardens climbing to the very upper stories of the mountains here beggars description; one no longer marvels at what he has seen in the way of terraced mountains in China.
The winding road led me up the flanks of stony hills, terraced everywhere for almond-trees; but after two or three hours of ascent the almonds dwindled away, and the country became an absolute desert of brashy hills, showing little asperity of outline, but mournful and solemn by their wastefulness and abandonment to a degree that makes the traveller ask himself if he is really in Europe, or has been transported by magic to the most arid steppes of Asia.
Instead of that, we bade good-by to bright sky, and plunged into a snowstorm, and, so greeted, drove down into the narrow gorges, whose steep slopes we could see were terraced to the top, and planted with vines.
I never knew, of course, just what it would be like, and had no way of knowing. I remembered Chinkie's little love of a farm in Sussex, and I'd been a week at the Westbury's place out on Long Island, with its terraced lawns and gardens and greenhouses and macadamized roads.
Now and then one was seen to rise from the interior of the pile to one of the terraced roofs, or another slowly sank from sight, as if descending into the interior of the earthy heap. On the outside, beams leaned against it, and on them people went up and down, as if climbing ladders. Thin films of smoke quivered in the air from imperceptible flues.
I rode through this strange garden utterly amazed and hardly able to realize the fact that in this remote and little known island, from which all Europeans except a few traders at the port are jealously excluded, many hundreds of square miles of irregularly undulating country have been so skillfully terraced and levelled, and so permeated by artificial channels, that every portion of it can be irrigated and dried at pleasure.
The terraced bank, of which I have spoken, was taken possession of early, and held by a solid mass of people; while the fair-ground proper was packed with a swaying concourse, densest near the royal pavilion, which was erected immediately on the race-course, and opposite the bank.
They were quickly driven in, and the Federal position became revealed. From the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge, clothed to their crests with under-growth and timber, the plain, over a mile in breadth, extended to the Shenandoah. The ground was terraced; the upper level, immediately beneath the mountain, was densely wooded, and fifty or sixty feet above the open fields round the Lewis House.
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