“Call her! Get her!” cried the mandarin, turning fiercely on the old farmer.
“What can I do?” he mumbled pathetically. “She is gone. You do not understand, she moves as the kin deer, she is as wild as the pheasant.”
The mandarin returned to the doorway and remained for a long time in moody silence. Presently he turned to the farmer.
“Let it be known that Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, will depart.”
And the old man skipped gleefully from the room.
CHAPTER TWO
THE VICEROY
Hangchau, the capital of Che Kiang, rests haughtily upon its hills in full view of the ocean. Its granite walls, more than thirty miles in circumference, higher than a four-storied building and wide enough on top for four vehicles to drive abreast, extend north from the river Tsien toward a vast plain that stretches out an unending garden threaded with a thousand strands of silvery waterways. South of the city along the blue waters of the bay is another mighty garden spotted with clumps of trees, covered with luxuriant crops and villages nestling in groves of feathery bamboo; westward is the lake of Si Hu, and beyond, a wide amphitheatre of wooded hills and mountains.
Hangchau, like Che Kiang, has an antiquity of its own and though it stands to-day one of the world’s great cities, so it has stood for innumerable ages, more or less, in the manner Marco Polo saw it in the thirteenth century, “pre-eminent to all other cities in the world in point of grandeur and beauty as well as from its abundant delights.”
In that uncertain antique age when Babylon rested securely within its hundred-mile wall pierced by eighty brazen gates; when the massive town of Troy frowned down upon the troubled waters of the Xanthus, and Darius peered anxiously from Persepolis across the plains of Merdueth, even then was Hangchau a city. And now while Babylon is but a mud-mound on the willow-fringed banks of the Euphrates, Troy a myth, and jackals come forth when the moon is high to howl where once kings commanded—yet Hangchau lives, thrives, and is great.
Another wonder of Hangchau other than its antiquity and greatness is the Lake of Si Hu, a lake transparent as a diamond, its brilliant surface gleaming and fluttering amongst dark green hills for many miles in irregular circuit. On the north, west, and southwest rise picturesque mountains whose slopes along the lake’s edge are laid out in groves and gardens, beautiful though fantastic; having here and there temples, palaces and pagodas, while numbers of fanciful stone bridges are thrown across the arms that reach out among the hills. About over the waters great numbers of barges gaily decorated, sail to and fro, the passengers dining, smoking and enjoying the breezes which blow down from the higher mountains, as well as the gay scenes, the whimsical gardens, palaces, pagodas, and overhanging groves.