As I gazed admiringly along the miles and miles of ripening wheat and golden rape, pink-flowering beans, interspersed everywhere with the inevitable poppy, swaying gently as in a sea of all the dainty colors of the rainbow, I did not wonder that Szech’wan had been called the Garden of China.  Greater or denser cultivation I had never seen.  The amphitheater-like hills smiled joyously in the first gentle touches of spring and enriching green, each terrace being irrigated from the one below by a small stream of water regulated in the most primitive manner (the windlass driven by man power), and not a square inch lost.  Even the mud banks dividing these fertile areas are made to yield on the sides cabbages and lettuces and on the tops wheat and poppy.  There are no fences.  You see before you a forest of mountains, made a dark leaden color by thick mists, from out of which gradually come the never-ending pictures of green and purple and brown and yellow and gold, which roll hither and thither under a cloudy sky in indescribable confusion.  The chain may commence in the south or the north in two or three soft, slow-rising undulations, which trend away from you and form a vapory background to the landscape.  From these (I see such a picture even as I write, seated on the stone steps in the middle of a mountain path), at once united and peculiarly distinct, rise five masses with rugged crests, rough, and cut into shady hollows on the sides, a faint pale aureola from the sun on the mists rising over the summits and sharp outlines.  Looking to the north, an immense curved line shows itself, growing ever greater, opening like the arch of a gigantic bridge, and binding this first group to a second, more complicated, each peak of which has a form of its own, and does in some sort as it pleases without troubling itself about its neighbor.  The most remarkable point about these mountains is the life they seem to possess.  It is an incredible confusion.  Angles are thrown fantastically by some mad geometer, it would seem.  Splendid banyan trees shelter one after toiling up the unending steps, and dotted over the landscape, indiscriminately in magnificent picturesqueness, are pretty farmhouses nestling almost out of sight in groves of sacred trees.  Oftentimes perpendicular mountains stand sheer up for three thousand feet or more, their sides to the very summits ablaze with color coming from the smiling face of sunny Nature, in spots at times where only a twelve-inch cultivation is possible.

A dome raises its head curiously over the leaning shoulder of a round hill, and a pyramid reverses itself, as if to the music of some wild orchestra, whose symphonies are heard in the mountain winds.  Seen nearer and in detail, these mountains are all in delicious keeping with all of what the imagination in love with the fantastic, attracted by their more distant forms, could dream.  Valleys, gorges, somber gaps, walls cut perpendicularly, rough or polished by water, cavities festooned with hanging stalactites and notched like Gothic sculptures—­all make up a strange sight which cannot but excite admiration.