Indeed, It Is Only By Walking Out At Least Half A Mile That You Escape
From The Aggressive Evidences Of Civilisation, And Come Out Into The
Rice-Fields At The Back Of The Town.
Here men with twists of blue and
white cloth round their heads are working knee deep in the thick black
mud.
The largest field may be something less than two tablecloths, while
the smallest is, say, a speck of undercliff, on to which it were hard to
back a 'rickshaw, wrested from the beach and growing its clump of barley
within spray-shot of the waves. The field paths are the trodden tops of
the irrigating cuts, and the main roads as wide as two perambulators
abreast. From the uplands - the beautiful uplands planted in exactly the
proper places with pine and maple - the ground comes down in terraced
pocket on pocket of rich earth to the levels again, and it would seem
that every heavily-thatched farmhouse was chosen with special regard to
the view. If you look closely when the people go to work you will see
that a household spreads itself over plots, maybe, a quarter of a mile
apart. A revenue map of a village shows that this scatteration is
apparently designed, but the reason is not given. One thing at least is
certain. The assessment of these patches can be no light piece of
work - just the thing, in fact, that would give employment to a large
number of small and variegated Government officials, any one of whom,
assuming that he was of an Oriental cast of mind, might make the
cultivator's life interesting.
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