Widow Mourningdetails

An endless breadth of green fields spreads on every side, interspersed withvillage that look from afar like tumuli, or ant-hills, shaded by palms, and not unfrequently clustering round the rubbish heaps and ruins of some destroyed city. Camels and asses, with their drivers, pass in long files along the dykes that stand up high above the plain; black buffaloes go down to the water to drink, and birds, large and small, far more numerous than in Europe, people the air. Here buffaloes are grazing, there half-naked men and women, in long blue garments, are labouring in a cotton-field.” (p. 620)