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In very rainy weather any one looking down upon it from a height could see that there was a sort of islet in the middle, but no one could have reached it with a boat unless in flood-time; and in very dry weather, when some of the ridges lay uncovered, the water-channels became thick black mud. Nothing in all this, however, gave serious cause for uneasiness.
To-day on our journey I noticed some native poplar-trees. We left all the water-channels on our left hand, and proceeded north across the plain, towards a low part or fall, between two ranges that run along the northern horizon. The valley consists of grassy flats, though somewhat thickly timbered with mulga. Some natives' fires were observed in the hills on our line of march.
The water-channels winding here and there, definable by crisp white shingling, appeared like threads tangled among islands green with grasses and fringed with reeds. Up from the final depths of the valley of the Jordan some venturous oleanders had crept, and with their large bloom now starred the sunken place. One palm-tree arose in royal assertion.
Eastward, from Yvre, you overlook first the Huisne, spanned at various neighbouring points by four bridges, but having much of the meadow-land in its valley cut up by little water-channels for purposes of irrigation these making the ground additionally difficult for an attacking force to traverse.
A great Indian river, at low water, suggests the familiar anatomical picture of a skinned human body, the intricate mesh of interwoven muscles and tendons to stand for water-channels, and the archipelagoes of fat and flesh inclosed by them to stand for the sandbars. Somewhere on this journey we passed such a river, and on a later journey we saw in the Sutlej the duplicate of that river.
The nearest water now to us that I knew of was at Fort Mueller, but I decided to return to it by a different route from that we had arrived on, and as some hills lay north-easterly, and some were pretty high, we went away in that direction. We travelled through the usual poor country, and crossed several dry water-channels. In one I thought to get a drink for the horses.
They were to look after the private houses 'in order that they may all be built according to laws', and to police and clean the roads and water-channels, both inside and outside of the city.
Returning now to the Dîwan-i-âm, we can ascend by one of the small staircases to the throne-room, and enter the upper arcades which surround the Machhi Bhawan, or "Fish Square." The courtyard has suffered so much from ruthless vandalism that it is difficult to realize its former magnificence. It was formerly laid out in marble with flower-beds, water-channels, fountains, and fish-tanks.
They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels, not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at, but of myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar.
Sometimes Gihon saw the whole procession of the Hunt silhouetted against the morning-blue, bearing him company for many merry miles. At every half mile the horses and the donkeys jumped the water-channels up, on, change your leg, and off again like figures in a zoetrope, till they grew small along the line of waterwheels.
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