e is lost. Over the steps hung heavy blue-green or green-black
pines, old, gnarled, and bossed. The foliage of the hillside was a
lighter green, but the pines set the keynote of colour, and the blue
dresses of the few folk on the steps answered it. There was no sunshine
in the air, but I vow that sunshine would have spoilt all. We climb for
five minutes,--I and the Professor and the camera,--and then we turned,
and saw the roofs of Nagasaki lying at our feet--a sea of lead and
dull-brown, with here and there a smudge of creamy pink to mark the
bloom of the cherry trees. The hills round the town were speckled with
the resting-places of the dead, with clumps of pine and feathery bamboo.

"What a country!" said the Professor, unstrapping his camera. "And have
you noticed, wherever we go there's always some man who knows how to
carry my kit? The _gharri_ driver at Moulmein handed me my stops; the
fellow at Penang knew all about it, too; and the 'rickshaw coolie has
seen a camera before. Curious, isn't it?"

"Professor," said I, "it's due to the extraordinary fact that we are not
the only people in the world. I began to realise it at Hong-Kong. It's
getting plainer now. I shouldn't be surprised if we turned out to be
ordinary human beings, after all."

We entered a courtyard where an evil-looking bronze horse stared at two
stone lions, and a company of children babbled among themselves. There
is a legend connected with the bronze horse, which may be found in the
guide-books. But the real true story of the creature is that he was made
long ago out of the fossil ivory of Siberia by a Japanese Prometheus,
and got life and many foals, whose descendants closely resemble their
father. Long years have almost eliminated the ivory in the blood, but it
crops out in creamy mane and tail; and the pot-belly and marvellous feet
of the bronze horse may be found to this day among the pack-ponies of
Nagasaki, who carry pack-saddles adorned with velvet and red cloth, who
wear grass shoes on their hind feet, and who are made like to horses in
a pantomime.

We could not go beyond this courtyard because a label said, "No
admittance," and thus all we saw of the temple was rich-brown high roofs
of blackened thatch, breaking back and back in wave and undulation till
they were lost in the foliage. The Japanese can play with thatch as men
play with modelling clay, but how their light underpinnings can carry
the weight of the roof is a mystery to t