This province is like an endless garden; whereever the eye reaches is seen not only a luxuriant vegetation but one that has been tended and reared by man for his uses. Patches of pink orchard blossoms alternate with grey thickets of mulberry; clumps of feathery bamboo flutter as plumes by the edges of rice fields; plane trees with their snowy blossoms alternate with orchards of pumelo, while along the lower hills, forming wide and densely shaded tracts, spread groves of silvery olive and lichee with delicate pink leaves and strawberry-like fruit.
Throughout all of these hills and orchards wind rivers, brooks, and canals, over-spanned at short intervals by high curved bridges of stone. Under their arches innumerable boats glide from dawn until night. In some places the country is covered with tea plantations, and from each willow-whipped cottage rises the fragrant breath of burning tea. Here and there on hills thick with cypress and pine are seen the carved gleaming roofs of temples, while on the paths leading to them every crag and turn has its miniature pagodas and grottoes. Again, the hills in many places are covered with groves of oil-bearing camelias, whose graceful shape and dark green foliage add an indescribable charm to the landscape.
But Che Kiang is not more famous for the charm of its countryside than it is for the beauty of the women, who dwell among its hills and valleys, working in the midst of their tea shrubs, rearing cocoons, spinning silk; and are no more thought of than the azaleas that brighten the hillsides or the purple lanwhui that scatters its perfume on the bosom of the careless passing winds. In the Tien Mu Mountains, toward the southwestern part of the province, these women have a peculiar hauteur and independence of their own, a vivacity and laughter, which is found nowhere else in China.
It was among these mountains and forests of the Tien Mu Shan that that tireless spider, Fate, set to weaving one of its innumerable webs of invisible strands: a net fragile yet terrible. Unseen or half seen, a spirit-glint in the azure heavens, it is a barrier through which and from which the little man-fly never breaks.
So the spider webbed in the Valley of the Fountain, and before this net is finally torn and shattered by the bluster of Time there shall be found in it those that did not know of its weaving.
One spring morning, probably about the same hour when a melancholy Breton and an unknown priest were setting out from the Mission of Yingching upon their errands of mercy, a mandarin’s retinue moved slowly along the Tien Mu Mountains and before the night mists had entirely cleared away the path brought them to the upper heights of a small glade, known as the Valley of the Fountain. Around this vale the rugged, broken mountains were clothed in trees of various sorts. The bright golden leaves of the camphor and amber mingled with the purple foliage of the tallow, while over these rose the deep soft green of pine and arbor vitae.
As the sun rose and sent its broadening beams down into the purple Valley of the Fountain the lower mountain sides became a gorgeous mass of red and yellow azaleas; on every hill-bank whereever the eye could reach spread a flower mantle of dazzling brightness. From the valley came the fragrance of tea; from the ravines, the breath of lilies and lanwhui.
As the retinue moved slowly down the tortuous path there rose from a thicket of tea shrubs on a round slope to the right an outburst of song not unlike that of the mocking bird in its sweet intensity and freedom but vibrant with the melody of human passion. And, as this wild song rose with supreme impulse and passion above the tea thicket, the mandarin’s retinue stopped.
Never was an auditorium more suitable to song than this amphitheatre of flower-packed hills that surrounded the Valley of the Fountain. The sun’s rays were just stealing through a purple haze and turning the dew, which lay heavy upon the flowers into myriads of opals; the murmur of ravine-hidden cascades, the chorus of bird-song in the still-aired morning, all seemed but part of the song that rose from the tea thicket. This tempestuous outburst made the hills ring with its echoes, calling, scorning, pleading, threatening; now bubbling like the wood-warbler with cadences of silvery notes; now rising, exultant as the night-lark, to the ear of heaven; triumphant, declamatory, beseeching, full of defiance, of mockery and laughter until at last it ceased, dying away among the neighbouring gorges, as soft as a kiss.
“What was that?” demanded the mandarin excitedly, putting his head out of the sedan.