CHAPTER LIII

OFF FOR CHINA

When I entered the town, at the turn of the principal street, I had the
good luck to meet Number 415, my poor relative. I was just at that
moment in want of a speedy djin, and I at once got into his vehicle;
besides, it was an alleviation to my feelings, in this hour of departure,
to take my last drive in company with a member of my family.

Unaccustomed as I was to be out of doors during the hours of siesta,
I had never yet seen the streets of the town thus overwhelmed by the
sunshine, thus deserted in the silence and solitary brilliancy peculiar
to all hot countries.

In front of all the shops hang white shades, adorned here and there with
slight designs in black, in the quaintness of which lurks I know not
what--something mysterious: dragons, emblems, symbolical figures.
The sky is too glaring; the light crude, implacable; never has this
old town of Nagasaki appeared to me so old, so worm-eaten, so bald,
notwithstanding all its veneer of new papers and gaudy paintings.
These little wooden houses, of such marvellous cleanly whiteness
inside, are black outside, timeworn, disjointed and grimacing. When one
looks closely, this grimace is to be found everywhere: in the hideous
masks laughing in the shop-fronts of the innumerable curio-shops; in the
grotesque figures, the playthings, the idols, cruel, suspicious, mad;
it is even found in the buildings: in the friezes of the religious
porticoes, in the roofs of the thousand pagodas, of which the angles and
cable-ends writhe and twist like the yet dangerous remains of ancient and