Page:Farmers of forty centuries.djvu/103

Rh quarter of a mile we counted thirty-one men and women carrying mud in baskets on bamboo poles swung across their shoulders, the mud being taken from just above the water line. The disposition of this material we could not see as it was carried beyond a rise in ground. We have little doubt that the mulberry fields were being covered with it. It was here that a rain set in and almost like magic the fields blossomed out with great numbers of giant rain hats and kittysols, where people had been unobserved before. From one o'clock until six in the afternoon we had travelled continuously through these mulberry fields stretching back miles from our line of travel on either hand, and the total acreage must have been very large. But we had now nearly reached the margin of the delta and the mulberries changed to fields of grain, beans, peas and vegetables.

After leaving the delta region the balance of the journey to Wuchow was through a hill country, the slopes rising steeply from near the river bank, leaving relatively little tilled or readily tillable land. Rising usually five hundred to a thousand feet, the sides and summits of the rounded, soil-covered hills were generally clothed with a short herbaceous growth and small scattering trees, oftenest pine, four to sixteen feet high, Fig. 44 being a typical landscape of the region. In several sections along the course of this river there are limited areas of intense erosion where naked gulleys of no mean magnitude have developed but these were exceptions and we were continually surprised at the remarkable steepness of the slopes, with convexly rounded contours almost everywhere, well mantled with soil, devoid of gulleys and completely covered with herbaceous growth dotted with small trees. The absence of forest growth finds its explanation in human influence rather than natural conditions.

Throughout the hill-land section of this mighty river the most characteristic and persistent human features were the stacks of brush-wood and the piles of stove wood along the