Chapter XXI

Following the road which climbs past the front of our dwelling, one passes a dozen or more old villas, a few garden walls, and then there is nothing but the lonely mountain side, with little paths winding upwards towards the summit through plantations of tea, bushes of camellias, underwood and rocks. The mountains round Nagasaki are covered with cemeteries; for centuries and centuries past it is up here they have brought their dead.

But there is neither sadness nor horror in these Japanese sepulchers; it would seem as if among this frivolous and childish people, death itself could not be taken seriously. The monuments are either Buddhas, in granite, seated on lotus, or upright funereal stones with an inscription in gold; they are grouped together in little enclosures in the midst of the woods, or on natural terraces delightfully situated, and are generally reached by long stairways of stone carpeted with moss; from time to time, these pass under one of the sacred gateways, of which the shape, always the same, rude and simple, is a smaller reproduction of those in the temples.

Up above us, the tombs of our mountain are of so hoary an antiquity that they no longer alarm any one, even by night. It is a region of forsaken cemeteries. The dead hidden away there have long since become one with the earth around them; and these thousands of little gray stones, these multitudes of ancient little Buddhas, eaten away by lichens, seem to be now no more than a proof of a series of existences, long anterior to our own, and lost forever and altogether in the mysterious depths of ages.