Which is
supposed to suggest to them that extreme caution is requisite.
Their shoes were always coming untied, and they wore out two sets
in four miles.
The top of the pass, like that of a great many
others, is a narrow ridge, on the farther side of which the track
dips abruptly into a tremendous ravine, along whose side we
descended for a mile or so in company with a river whose
reverberating thunder drowned all attempts at speech. A glorious
view it was, looking down between the wooded precipices to a
rolling wooded plain, lying in depths of indigo shadow, bounded by
ranges of wooded mountains, and overtopped by heights heavily
splotched with snow! The vegetation was significant of a milder
climate. The magnolia and bamboo re-appeared, and tropical ferns
mingled with the beautiful blue hydrangea, the yellow Japan lily,
and the great blue campanula. There was an ocean of trees
entangled with a beautiful trailer (Actinidia polygama) with a
profusion of white leaves, which, at a distance, look like great
clusters of white blossoms. But the rank undergrowth of the
forests of this region is not attractive. Many of its component
parts deserve the name of weeds, being gawky, ragged umbels, coarse
docks, rank nettles, and many other things which I don't know, and
never wish to see again. Near the end of this descent my mare took
the bit between her teeth and carried me at an ungainly gallop into
the beautifully situated, precipitous village of Ichikawa, which is
absolutely saturated with moisture by the spray of a fine waterfall
which tumbles through the middle of it, and its trees and road-side
are green with the Protococcus viridis.
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