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The plain stretched on endlessly; here and there were paddy-fields; sometimes she found herself standing knee-deep in water. At the first glimmer of dawn she heard one or two birds cry from the bamboo-clumps by the distant houses. Then terror seized her. She could not tell in what new relation she stood to the earth and to living folk.
If you are up very early in the morning you may see large herds of buffaloes and bullocks being driven to the paddy-fields. These surround the village, sometimes extending for miles in different directions; but often they are simply small clearings scattered through the jungle.
At the eastern end, to the eye the most delightful spot in or near the town, there are several patches of paddy-fields, situated in deep valleys between the hills, of limited extent, but which, under this climate, seem to generate malaria in quantities quite disproportionate to their size.
Men and women and boys and girls move about the farm, happy in their labors, and far, far away dwell the mountain gods, who send the great Yellow River sweeping down through the valleys where the poppy is in bloom. It is to possess that farm, most honorable sir, and those paddy-fields that I covet wealth." "And in spite of the opium which you consume, you have never lost sight of this ideal?"
We arrived at Nielgalla in the evening without farther sport: here we killed a few couple of snipe in the paddy-fields, which added to our dinner. Dec. 10. Having beaten several miles of country without seeing any signs of elephants, we came unexpectedly upon a herd of wild buffaloes; they were standing in beautiful open ground, interspersed with trees, about a hundred and ten paces from us.
Now the base forms an uneven shelf of great extent, about two thousand feet above the villages. This shelf or valley appears to have suffered at some remote period from a terrible inundation. Landslips of great size and innumerable deep gorges and ravines furrow the bottom of the basin, until at length a principal fissure carries away the united streams to the paddy-fields below.
As previously described, at the base of the mountains are cultivated rice-lands, generally known as paddy-fields, where numerous villages have sprung up from the facility with which a supply of water is obtained from the wild mountains above them.
In the first place, the paddy-fields at the east end of the town must be thoroughly drained, and the cultivation of paddy in the neighbourhood entirely stopped. Proclamations on this last subject had been published in March last.
The Pearl River is too shallow for large steamers to go up any higher; so we stopped here only a few minutes to disembark some of the Chinese passengers, and from this point the interesting part of the voyage began. The river, as well as all the little supplementary creeks, was alive with junks and sampans masts and sails stuck up in every direction, gliding about among the flat paddy-fields.
Chusan was held for some months, at the cost of the lives of many of the soldiers, who suffered from the poisonous exhalations from the paddy-fields, having nothing to do to employ their minds; while the seamen of the Melville, which had been hove down for repairs, kept their health during the six weeks they were employed on her. The squadron got as far north as the great wall of China.
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