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Rh forest trees nor wide level fields reaching away to unbroken horizons. But the low, rounded, soil-mantled mountain tops clothed in herbaceous and young forest growth fell everywhere into lower hills and these into narrow steep valleys which dropped by a series of water-level benches, as seen in Fig. 225, to the main river courses. Each one of these millions of terraces, set about by its raised rim, was a silvery sheet of water dotted in the daintiest manner with bunches of rice just transplanted, but not so close nor yet so high and over-spreading as to obscure the water, yet quite enough to impart to the surface a most delicate sheen of green; and the grass-grown narrow rims retaining the water in the basins, cemented them into series of the most superb mosaics, shaped into the valley bottoms by artizan artists perhaps two thousand years before and maintained by their descendants through all the years since, that on them the rains and fertility from the mountains and the sunshine from heaven might be transformed by the rice plant into food for the families

Fig. 226—Group of houses standing in rice paddies, on edge of terraces, surrounded by water.