IN THE EASTERN AliCHTPELAGO. 169 



pretty effect in each of these miaiaturo green-walled ponds, 

 whose surface, save where the fountains played and for the 

 silent circles of each outflow-vortex, was unbroken by a single 

 ripple. As the terraces rose but little above each other, the 

 blue sky was reflected as in a mirror along the whole valley, 

 while the bright green of the young corn peeping up above the 

 surface, by giving a green colour to the mirror without in the 

 least breaking to the eye the placid surface of the water, or 

 interfering with perfect reflection of the ever-changing face of 

 the sky, produced a beautiful effect impossible to describe in 

 words. Here and there, adding life to the scene, in the midst 

 of these fields were smoking cottages embowered in groves of 

 Eriodendron and Acacia trees. 



Fording the river, the road took us, after a steep ascent, for 

 several miles along almost a knife-ridge under a grand old 

 avenue of virgin forest, at whose termination I half expected 

 to find a stately castle or an ancient ruin. As we approached 

 the village the forest became less dense, and we passed between 

 a line of tall red-leaved Hanjuangs (Calodracon Jacquinii), 

 a shrub sacred to their graveyards. Under this avenue of 

 mourning, just outside the village gate, was laid out that one 

 institution, at all events, common to the most exalted civilisa- 

 tion and the most debased barbarism — the Home of the dead. 

 Each little mound, often surmounted by circular ornamented 

 pillars of wood diverging from each other at opposite ends of 

 the grave within a fenced and neatly tended inclosure, was 

 planted with Crotons and beautiful-leaved shrubs. 



The village itself surprised me not a little. It might have 

 been a feudal castle. As its name, Hoodjoong or '• the village 

 on the verge," implies, it was situated at the extremity of 

 the long narrow ridge along which I had come, and was in- 

 accessible, owing to precipitous slopes dipping down into the 

 deep valley on all sides except on the one we had approached 

 it by, and there the road, rising in a short steep incline, passed 

 into the village under a narrow gateway cut out of the soft 

 tufa which hid the village till it was passed. All that was 

 wanted to complete the picture was ' a battlemented tower or 

 two over it, and the chains of a drawbridge and portcullis. 

 The village looked down into a deep alluvial valley laid out 

 in rice-plots along the banks of a stream whose double sources 



