CHAPTER IX

Summary

OUR short halt had expired; we had still our twenty miles to ride before night. The novelty excited by our stay had been slightly worn off, our bill was paid, and all that was necessary to transact before we bade goodbye to the secluded town, accomplished. We moved out into the streets again, through the lanes of upturned faces on each side; and were soon in the country, plodding and ploughing through sandy roads, sometimes uphill, sometimes downhill; into villages and out again, nearing the mountains one half-hour, and leaving them the next; buried in the surging seas of millet, disentombed in speckled fields of melons or auriferous cotton shrubs; half swamped amongst Indian corn, gliding through arcades of sylvan architecture bidding defiance to the thoroughfare of the sun, or across encaustic squares of dye-plants and brown earth; on to roads divergent, convergent — everything but straight, and irregular, heavy, and shifting, inconsistent and unendurable, in their general character, were it not for the mellow temperature of the afternoon and the agreeable diversity of everything coming within the range of vision. A large piece of ground is passed which is solely given up to the cultivation of the greenish-purple indigo, among the even lines of which hoers are industriously turning over and breaking up the earth. Two wide cisterns of white cement, some eight or ten feet in breadth, and four or five in depth, are in the middle of the crop for the maceration or fermentation of the plants which are not yet in flower.