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Updated: May 3, 2025
The drowsy landscape on either side was Southern landscape, and among live-oaks draped with mourning flags of moss, and magnolia-trees gemmed with buds, there were planters' houses which seemed all roof and balcony. Buzzards flew up suddenly, out of rice-fields, as the ship rounded a curve creatures big and long-legged as the storks of Holland and Algeria.
So together they started off, the sailor-soldier of England and the soldier of the cross, each with the same place in view but each with a very different object. It took three days journey from Tamsui across rice-fields and up hillsides to reach even the foot of the mountains. Here there lived a village of natives, closely related to the savages.
On the shores of the mainland and on an occasional island are ancient forts which revive memories of interesting experiences of the white man's invasion of the Celestial kingdom, and the foreground of rice-fields is backed by interminable groves of mulberry-trees explaining China's preeminence as a silk producer.
Amarnura, a very small village, lies in a narrow plain of rice-fields extending from the sea to a range of low hills. From the landing-place to the village is about a quarter of a mile. The narrow path leading to it passes round the base of a small hill, covered with pines, on the outskirts of the village.
Mackay had not used any sort of animal in his work since that disastrous day when he had tried in vain to ride the stubborn Lu-a. But now he gladly mounted the sedate little steed and trotted away along the narrow pathway between the rice-fields toward Ka-le-oan.
The peasant ploughs the rice-fields with the same wooden stick and ungainly buffalo, and carries the rice-sheaves from the harvest field with the same shoulder poles, used in all the farther East to-day.
He loves the sight of the brilliant emerald rice-fields, of the tall feathery palms, of the shady banyan trees, of the flaming poinsettias, the bright marigolds, cannas and bougainvillea, the many-coloured crotons and calladiums, the sweet-scented jasmine, oranges, tuberoses, and gardenia; and the gaudy jays, the swiftly darting parrots, and the playful squirrels.
From time to time that is, from distance to distance we met with rice-fields, cultivated after the Tagal manner, and then did my lieutenant exclaim most joyously to me: "Master, we are now in Christian ground." He was right; the road was becoming more easy.
It is, I believe, owing to the abundance of water, there being rice-fields all around us, in which they dam up the water, so that all the country hereabouts is about a foot deep in water; and as we have rain, though moderate to what I expected the rainy season to be, yet the continual moisture occasions fevers in such situations where rice is cultivated...Felt at home and thankful these days.
My eyes revelled in vastness, as they swept over the broad flat jungle at the mountain foot, a desolate sheet of dark gigantic grasses, furrowed with the paths of the buffalo and rhinoceros, with barren sandy water-courses, desolate pools, and here and there a single tree, stunted with malaria, shattered by mountain floods; and far beyond, the vast plains of Hindostan, enlaced with myriad silver rivers and canals, tanks and rice-fields, cities with their mosques and minarets, gleaming among the stately palm-groves along the boundless horizon.
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