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After descending to the level of the tide and passing through some thickets of wild shrubbery, we arrived upon a grassy plain immediately upon the border of the creek; and there, in a quiet, sequestered nook of rural landscape, the smooth and sluggish little inlet begirt with waterlilies and reflecting wood and sky and the green hill-side upon its surface, was the chosen resting-place of the departed generations of the family.
We rowed for half a mile through a magnificent bed of Victoria waterlilies, the flower-buds of which were just beginning to expand. Beyond the mouth of the Catua, a channel leading to one of the great lakes so numerous in the plains of the Amazons, which we passed on the 25th, the river appeared greatly increased in breadth.
Justinus de Nassau, at its close, was more successful in his retreat to the ships. He, too, sprang into the water when the overthrow was absolute; but, alighting in some shallows, was able to conceal himself among weeds and waterlilies till he had divested himself of his armour, when he made his escape by swimming to a boat, which conveyed him to Lillo.
The Reach always slept; for nearly twelve miles it lay, a swaying garland of heliotrope and purple waterlilies, gleaming through a graceful fringe of palms and rushes and scented shrubs, touched here and there with shafts of sunlight, and murmuring and rustling with an attendant host of gorgeous butterflies and flitting birds and insects. Dan looked on the scene with approving eyes.
So orders were given for a huge entertainment in the Arta Gardens just outside Kâbul. They were the most beautiful gardens, not close cropped and orderly like English gardens, but with wide, bare, marble-paved walks and squares, big marble-stepped tanks full of waterlilies, all set in tangles of widespread roses and jasmine and gardenia.
Quails and francolins scurried about under low-growing shrubs, peacock-pheasants strutted and sunned themselves, pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles, from force of habit now that the rivalry of the mating season was over; choughs, ravens, and loud-throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and bright-hued Chinese pond-herons and delicately stepping egrets waded among the waterlilies of a marble-terraced tank.
The filmy leaflet hung like scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like waterlilies on emerald streams. It was of such a beverage that Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote: "The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs.
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