es clamber or on
which immense quantities of red pepper are drying in the autumn sun.
Nor would the dress of the people--everybody {61} in white (or what
was once white) garments--have seemed strange in ancient Judea.

There is also the same mixture of plains and peaks as Bible pictures
of the Holy Land have made familiar, and at night, as October's
hunters' moon glorifies all the landscape, a faint light gleaming here
and there from an opening in the rock huts, and with Arcturus and the
Pleiades of Job in the sky, it has seemed almost sacrilege to mar the
ancient environment by such an anachronism as a modern railway
locomotive. Rather, in looking out over the picturesque mountains and
valleys and sniffing the cool, dry air, you feel "the call of the
wild" in your blood. Across long centuries the life of your far-gone
nomadic ancestors calls to you. Almost irresistibly you are moved to
take a human friend and a friendly horse or pony and pitch your camp
out under the great stars--larger and brighter indeed do they seem to
burn here in the Orient--and feel the dew on your face as you awaken
in the "morning calm" of the ancient Hermit Kingdom, whose feeble life
was snuffed out, like the flame of a burnt-down candle, but a few
short months ago.

As I came into Seoul three nights ago I found it hardly less
fascinating than the country through which I had travelled during the
day. Through ancient streets, unlit by any electric glare, strangely
robed, almost spirit-like white figures were gliding here and there in
the moonlight, singly or in groups, and but a few minutes' ride in our
rickshaws brought us to the old South Gate. Great monument of a dead
era is it, relic of the days when Seoul trusted to its ten miles of
massive stone walls (already a century old when Columbus set sail from
Palos) to keep out the war-like Mongol and Tartar.

In Japan I found a different world from that which I had known, but a
world in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the
familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have
found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable,
almost untouched by {62} Western influences--dirty, squalid,
unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare
mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing
their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through an adjacent
valley. The thatched or tiled roofs of the houses are but li