The ground on either side was cut up into fields, which evidently drew their water from the irrigation channel, for there were water-cuts and banks, and at one place a man was opening a little rough sluice to let the water on to the fields at the side.
About us were wooded slopes, and all along the hillsides little terraced fields, fruit orchards with grey stone walls, scattered little stone houses, and ricks of straw and hay.
“You have a fertile country, Aryenis, and a beautiful one. Look at those hills there!”
Beyond us long slopes of blue hills, climbing ever higher and higher toward the main snow-peak, and between them dim blue shadows, not unlike my own Sussex country that Kipling sings of:
“Belt upon belt, the wooded dim
Blue goodness of the weald.”
“Is it not, Harilek? I know no other country save that of the Green Sakae, but I love this more than all I have seen. Is your country like this?”
“My own is just like that part there under the hills. I might almost be looking at the landscape round my father’s house at home.”
“You said your father was dead, or so my father told me. Who, then, holds his land? Have you an elder brother?”
“No. I had only one brother, and he was killed during the war I spoke of. My sister, whose husband was also killed in the same war, lives there now while I am away.”