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The mother is touched by the gentle kindliness of the stranger and confides her sorrows to her. Other homes are visited. People expecting the kind visitor brush up and tidy their huts. "So the picnic excursion ends leaving a cleaner and happier spot nestling in among those mountainsides. Several visits are paid to the little village.
For ages, the rivers plunged down the mountainsides and exhausted their energies without any appreciable contribution to man's service; now they are estimated as so many units of horse-power, and we find that their fretting and foaming was merely a language which they employed to tell us of their strength and of their willingness to work for us.
Nowhere is there a sign of refreshing verdure except on the distant mountainsides, where patches of green grass glow in the sunlight among the vast fields of sage. The buildings throughout the entire Territory are, almost without exception, of adobe.
When I left the house, it was showering briskly; but the drops quite ceased, and the clouds began to break away before I reached my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my right shoulder. July 21st. We left Grasmere yesterday, after breakfast; it being a delightful morning, with some clouds, but the cheerfullest sunshine on great part of the mountainsides and on ourselves.
"The sky opened on us like a broadside from an aerial squadron, and how we ever managed to get here I'm sure I can hardly tell. We were actually carried down the mountainsides by the water, and how it failed to drown us will be an everlasting mystery. Somehow, we found ourselves among these people, who were trying to go up, assuring us that there was nothing but water below.
The cry rings against the mountainsides, shuddering and failing; then it is lost in the vastness, like the sound of a pebble pitched into rushing waters. The woodland chorus takes it up in its own wolfish tongue, and it plunges forth again, magnified by the din of a thousand echoes.
And the summer twilight there is long, and as it dips into night a drowsiness rises fog-like over the valley. When a half-moon hangs between the mountains its light is that of drooping drowsy lids. The lamps in the cabins on the mountainsides gleam but a brief time and go out. The descending of the shade of night is the universal bedtime of the mountain people.
If you have never had any experience with the stuff, you are likely to go out with a bang and a puff of bluish-brown smoke when you go. On the other hand, you may believe the weird tales one reads now and then, of how whole mountainsides have been thrown down by the discharge of a few sticks of dynamite.
In the country north of Peking I found river valley after river valley once rich and productive but now become an abomination of desolation covered with countless tons of sand and stone brought down from the treeless mountainsides.
It would be amazing if it wound only over plains and lowlands, but where we saw it this morning it climbed one mountain height after another until the topmost point towered far above us, dizzy, stupendous, magnificent. By what means the thousands and thousands of tons of rock and brick were ever carried up the sheer steep mountainsides is a question that must excite every traveller's wonder.
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