culty was removed by bringing from the missionary's house two
solid teak-wood armchairs, to serve us after the sedan fashion. Long
poles of bamboo were lashed underneath them, and, after we had seated
ourselves, eight men, four for each chair, lifted these poles, with
their superimposed American pilgrims, upon their shoulders. Then began a
triumphal march, which at every step of the ascent threatened to become
a funeral march. The bearers all had bare feet, feet twice as long as
the steps were broad, so that they practically went upward on their
toes. A single misstep would have caused disaster--nothing less than an
avalanche of coolies, chairs, and pilgrims. But my secretary guarded me,
the missionary guarded my wife, and we went up in safety.

Going upward some two hundred steps, we rested upon a platform with a
pagoda which enshrined the statue of a Buddha perhaps twenty feet in
height and covered with gold-leaf from top to toe. Any worshiper can
prove his faith by clapping a bit of gold-leaf upon the statue. The
result is that the hands and feet of Buddha are thick with encrusted
gold. He holds out his hands in seeming invitation. Two hundred feet
more brought us to a second platform and a second pagoda in which Buddha
also appears; but now he is in the attitude of teaching. Still another
ascent, and we come to a pagoda in which Buddha stands, a towering form
fifty feet in height, with his finger extended in expectation toward the
plain. And a final ascent brings us to a colossal Buddha, now reclining,
as if his work were done and he were entering upon the bliss of Nirvana.
At this last stage there is also a series of waxwork figures which
symbolize the vanity of life and of human desire. Four forms represent,
first, the babe at its mother's breast; secondly, the youth full of
vigor; then the older man haggard with care; and finally, the corpse,
upon whose vitals the birds of the air are preying.

From the summit of this Mandalay Hill, another pagoda, almost as famous,
is to be seen. I mean the Kuthodaw, in the plain below. This is four
hundred and fifty pagodas in one, all but one of them little edifices,
each with a small sitting statue of Buddha within it. An even more
remarkable thing is that each of these diminutive pagodas has also
within it a portion of the Buddhist scriptures, engraved upon a solid
block of stone, and all of these together make up the Tripitaka, upon
which the Buddhist pins his faith. In the