Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The fields of Egypt are more regularly watered than those of any other country bordering on the Mediterranean, except the rice-grounds in Italy, and perhaps the marcite or winter meadows of Lombardy; but irrigation is more or less employed throughout almost the entire basin of that sea, and is everywhere attended with effects which, if less in degree, are analogous in character, to those resulting from it in Egypt.
"Do not be afraid, dear madam. I was not thinking of any witchcraft; but only wishing your children the bright mirror of a clear and settled mind. I think such a mirror would show them that what they take for loyalty and patriotism in their own feelings and conduct, is no more loyalty and patriotism than the dancing lights in our rice-grounds are stars." "What is it, my dear, do you think?"
Soon the only kind of cultivation to be seen from the road consists of rice-grounds, looking like what in truth they are poisonous swamps. Then come swamps pure and simple, too bad even to be turned into rice grounds, or rather simply swamps impure; for a stench at most times of the year comes from them, like a warning of their pestilential nature, and their unfitness for the sojourn of man.
When the bargain was made, two very small canoes were produced, in which they embarked; the canoes being placed along-side of each other, and held together, a precaution which was absolutely necessary to prevent their oversetting, the navigation was at length safely performed, though not without some difficulty; and when they landed in the new town, the people received them with great friendship, and showed them the houses of their kings and principal people, which are in this district: Few of them, however, were open, for at this time the people had taken up their residence in the rice-grounds, to defend the crop against the birds and monkies, by which it would otherwise have been destroyed.
The climate of the Southern States is in general not necessarily unhealthy for the white man, but he can scarcely sleep a single night in the vicinity of the rice-grounds without being attacked by a dangerous fever. The neighborhood of the rice-fields is possibly less pestilential in Lombardy and Piedmont than in South Carolina and Georgia, but still very insalubrious to both man and beast.
In the rice-grounds the soil is divided into compartments rising in gradual succession to the level of the irrigating canal, in order that the water, after having flowed one field, may be drawn off to another, and thus a single current serve for several compartments, the lowest field, of course, still being higher than the ditch which at last drains both it and the adjacent soil.
The 'Behemoth' of Job is beyond a doubt neither whale nor devil, but, I think, the hippopotamus; who is indeed as ugly as the devil, and will occasionally play the devil among the rice-grounds; but though in this respect a devil of a fellow, yet on the whole he is too honest a monster to be a fellow of devils. 'Vindiciæ Behemoticæ'. Chap. XXXVI. p. 390. 'Of Witchcraft'.
Houses and villages, marked out by dense clumps of cocoa-nut palms, tamarind and other fruit trees, are dotted about in every direction; while between then extend luxuriant rice-grounds, watered by an elaborate system of irrigation that would be the pride of the best cultivated parts of Europe.
The slave trade flourishes among these lonely hills, murder and violence are rife; the methods of warfare, comprising poisoned arrows, and bullets containing splinters of glass, denote absolute barbarism, and the enormous island, which ought to be a field of emigration for some of Java's twenty-seven millions, except for the coast campongs and the rice-grounds of the far interior, remains one of the waste places of the earth, in spite of a perfect climate and a teeming soil.
Groves of cocoanuts were interspersed among the rice-grounds which extended, intermixed with grassy fields, to the sea-shore, bounded by a long line of Casuarina trees. Little hamlets lie scattered in all directions, some distinctly visible, other nearly hidden by the rich green foliage of fruit-trees.
Word Of The Day