Kotmasu even is silent, and makes no further attempt to explain English ways and customs to Mousmé.
The hillside, with its drenched foliage and grassy slopes, is like a sheet of frosted silver. In the foreground lies our garden set thick with Nature’s flashing, gem-like rain-drops. The harbour can be seen again, as usual, an immense black pearl of irregular shape, with here and there a streak of moonlight pencilled on its tranquil surface. The cemeteries and tea-fields stretched below us to the right and left are but darker oxidised silver; the temples and tea-houses but embossed figures.
Down quite below us is the still darker patch of colouring, immense, far-spreading, which marks the town; the lights and the gleam of lanterns look in the damp air like angry eyes seen in tears.
Few sounds reach us, and even the cicala’s chirp is far less noisy than usual.
