The lake was so near that just across the road stone steps led down into it, under a great stone pailou with four columns. The sky was cloudy, the water of the lake milky white, darkened by fleets of little islands connected by shapely half-moons of bridges, or causeways, planted in trees; low mountains hemmed it in with delicate but firm corves of blue and fainter, smokier gray. At its far end Megan could see the town, and all around the shores a succession of gardens and groves from which rose low, tiled roofs of pleasure houses. Before the yamen a backwater formed by a bend of the shore was filled with drifts of lotus plants. She turned to look behind the yamen where the hills were very close. On one of them stood the trunk of a pagoda, shorn of all its roofs and bells, out of the top of which sprouted a ferny growth. Megan was overcome by beauty, for which nothing that Doctor Strike or the General had said had adequately prepared her, but she thought she recognized in it nevertheless a quality similar to that of the landscape seen from the train. The one line that drew the eye upward was that of the pagoda trunk, which even without its upturned eaves struck a note of intended levity amid the great, flowing, earth-bound curves which circled and so completely enclosed the horizon. When the chair came Megan climbed in and Mah-li recommended that she let down the small blinds before the windows on either side so that her appearance would create no comment in the streets. The coolies picked up the poles and started off with a peculiar jouncing motion that gave Megan a headache. Every now and then at a cry they stopped and shifted the poles to the other shoulder. She drew her blind back a little so as to look at the lake. As they crossed one of the causeways, planted in trees, they passed through more platoons of soldiers marching in goose step, absurdly unmilitary creatures, with ingenuous smiling faces. On the left side of the road were garden walls enclosing summer-houses and gardens, most of them of ox-blood red, with undulating dragon tops and odd-shaped windows elaborately latticed. They came to the outskirts of the town, to narrow lanes between small shops and whitewashed blank walls, sometimes with great black characters painted on them, lanes so narrow they jostled against the coolies with their carrying-poles. The streets grew more crowded and noisy. Megan held open only a crack of space between the blind and the window so that she saw in too quickly passing glimpses. The sun came out and the chair began to get uncomfortably warm. In a street in the heart of the town they stopped and got out. Megan followed Mah-li into a shop through a wide portal of profusely carved and gilded wood. In the gloom hundreds of jars on shelves around the wall looked down at them like great glaucous eyes.