to hand to me, with a profound bend of the whole body, the correct pose
of the hands on the knees, and a long, snake-like hiss.




CHAPTER XXI

ANCIENT TOMBS

Pursuing the path that winds past our dwelling, one passes a dozen or
more old villas, a few garden-walls, and then sees nothing but the lonely
mountain-side, with little paths winding upward toward the summit through
plantations of tea, bushes of camellias, underbrush, and rocks. The
mountains round Nagasaki are covered with cemeteries; for centuries and
centuries they have brought their dead up here.

But there is neither sadness nor horror in these Japanese sepulchres; it
seems as if, among this frivolous and childish people, death itself could
not be taken seriously. The monuments are either granite Buddhas, seated
on lotus, or upright tombstones with inscriptions in gold. They are
grouped together in little enclosures in the midst of the woods, or on
natural terraces delightfully situated, and are usually reached by long
stairways of stone carpeted with moss. Sometimes these pass under one of
the sacred gateways, of which the shape, always the same, rude and
simple, is a smaller reproduction of those in the temples.

Above us, the tombs of our mountain are of an antiquity so hoary that
they no longer alarm any one, even at night. It is a region of forsaken
cemeteries. The dead hidden away there have long since become one with