being separated from its neighbour by a space
of what had once, I suppose, been garden-ground, but was now dense and
tangled bush. They were all built of the same coloured stone, and most
of them had pillars, which was as much as we could make out in the
fading light as we passed swiftly up the main road, that I believe I am
right in saying no living foot had pressed for thousands of years.[*]

[*] Billali told me that the Amahagger believe that the site
of the city is haunted, and could not be persuaded to enter
it upon any consideration. Indeed, I could see that he
himself did not at all like doing so, and was only consoled
by the reflection that he was under the direct protection of
_She_. It struck Leo and myself as very curious that a
people which has no objection to living amongst the dead,
with whom their familiarity has perhaps bred contempt, and
even using their bodies for purposes of fuel, should be
terrified at approaching the habitations that these very
departed had occupied when alive. After all, however, it is
only a savage inconsistency.--L. H. H.

Presently we came to an enormous pile, which we rightly took to be a
temple covering at least eight acres of ground, and apparently arranged
in a series of courts, each one enclosing another of smaller size, on
the principle of a Chinese nest of boxes, the courts being separated one
from the other by rows of huge columns. And, while I think of it, I may
as well state a remarkable thing about the shape of these columns, which
resembled none that I have ever seen or heard of, being fashioned with a
kind of waist at the centre, and swelling out above and below. At first
we thought that this shape was meant to roughly symbolise or suggest
the female form, as was a common habit amongst the ancient religious
architects of many creeds. On the following day, however, as we went up
the slopes of the mountain, we discovered a large quantity of the most
stately looking palms, of which the trucks grew exactly in this shape,
and I have now no doubt but that the first designer of those columns
drew his inspiration from the graceful bends of those very palms, or
rather of their ancestors, which then, some eight or ten thousand years
ago, as now, beautified the slopes of the mountain that had once formed
the shores of the volcanic lake.

At the _facade_ of this huge temple, which, I should imagine, is almost
as la