The view seems limitless, it is complete in every direction, unbarred by any obstruction, natural or artificial. First I look eastwards to those great ranges of unexplored mountains, rising tier after tier, their outlines clear as cut cameos against the grey-blue sky. Betwixt them and my point of sight flows a great river, and though it is ten or twelve miles distant as the crow flies, I can see that it is brown with flood-water, and, in some places, overflowing its banks. Nearer lie the green rice-fields and orchards, and, nearer still, the spurs of the great range on whose highest point I stand.
Then northward, that is the view that is usually shut out from me. It is only hill and dale, river and plain, but it is grand by reason of its extent, beautiful in colour and form, intensely attractive in the vastness of those miles of mysterious jungle, untrodden, save by the feet of wild beasts; endless successions of mountain and valley, peak and spur, immovable and eternal. You know there are grey days and golden days; as there are crimson and heliotrope evenings, white, and, alas! also black nights—well, this is a blue day. There is sunlight, but it is not in your eyes, it only gives light without shedding its own colour on the landscape. The atmosphere seems to be blue; the sky is blue, except on the horizon, where it pales into a clear grey. Blue forest-clad hills rise, in the middle distance, from an azure plain, and the distant mountains are sapphire, deep sapphire. The effect is strange and uncommon, but supremely beautiful.
Westward, a deep valley runs down from this range into the flat, forest-covered plains, till, nearing the coast, great patches of light mark fields of sugar-canes and thousands upon thousands of acres of rice. Then the sea, the sea dotted by distant islands, the nearest thirty miles away, the farthest perhaps fifty. The morning heat is drawing a veil of haze across the distance; on a clear evening a great island, eighty miles away to the northward, is clearly visible.
I turn to the south, and straight before me rises the grand blue peak of a mountain, 6000 feet high, and not more than six miles away. It is the highest point of a gigantic mass of hill that seems to fill the great space between the flooded river and the bright calm sea. Looking across the eastern shoulder of the mountain, the eye wanders over a wide plain, lost far away to the south in cloud-wrapt distance. Beyond the western slopes lies the calm mirror of a summer sea, whereon many islands seem to float. The coast-line is broken, picturesque and beautiful, by reason of its many indentations and the line of bold hills which, rising sheer out of the water, seem to guard the shore.
Due west I see across the deep valley into my friend’s house, where it crowns the ridge, and then beyond to that vast plain which, in its miles and miles of forest-covered flatness, broken by great river-mouths, long vistas of deep lagoons, and a group of shining pools scattered over its surface, forms one of the strangest features in this matchless panorama of mountain, river and plain, sea, sky, and ever-changing cloud-effects.
There is an empty one-roomed hut of brown palm-leaves on this most lonely peak. One pushes the mat window upwards and supports it on a stick,—beneath the window is a primitive seat or couch. That is where I have been sitting, a cool breeze blowing softly through the wide open windows. I could not stay there any longer, the place seemed full of memories of another day, when there was no need, and no inclination, to look outside to see the beauty of the world and the divine perfection of the Creator’s genius. And then I heard something, it must have been fancy, but there was a faint but distinct jingle of metal.
It is better out here, sitting on a moss-grown boulder in the pleasant warmth of the sun. The swifts are circling the hill, and they flash past me with the hiss of a sword cleaving the air. I look down on the tops of all these stunted trees, heavy with their burden of creepers and mosses straining towards the light. A great bunch of pitcher-plants is hanging in front of me, pitcher-plants a foot long, scarlet and yellow, green and purple, in all the stages of their growth, their lids standing tilted upwards, leaving the pitcher open to be filled by any passing shower. But my eyes travel across all the intervening miles to rest upon the sea, the sea which is now of a quite indescribable blue, basking under a sky of the same colour. Out there, westward, if I could only pierce the distance, I should see——
Ah! the great white clouds are rising and warning me to go. Good-bye! good-bye! for you the missing words are as plain as these.