rilliant fairyland of lanterns and costumes, yet another, ethereally
blue in the haze of distance; all Nagasaki, its pagodas, its
mountains, its still waters full of the rays of moonlight, seem to
rise up with us into the air. Slowly, step by step, one may say it
springs up around, enveloping in one great shimmering veil all the
foreground, with its dazzling red lights and many-colored streamers.

No doubt we are getting near, for here are the religious steps,
porticos and monsters hewn out of enormous blocks of granite. We now
have to climb a series of steps, almost earned by the surging crowd
ascending with us.

The temple court-yard; we have arrived.

This is the last and most astonishing scene in the evening's
fairy-tale,--a luminous and weird scene with fantastic distances
lighted up by the moon and the gigantic trees, the sacred
cryptomerias, stretching forth their dark somber boughs like a vast
dome.

Here we are all seated with our mousmes, beneath the light awning
wreathed in flowers, of one of the many little tea-houses improvised
in this courtyard. We are on a terrace at the top of the great steps,
up which the crowd continues to flock; we are at the foot of a portico
which stands up erect with the rigid massiveness of a colossus against
the dark night sky; at the foot also of a monster, who stares down
upon us, with his big stony eyes, his cruel grimace and smile.

This portico and the monster are the two great overwhelming masses in
the foreground of the incredible scene before us; they stand out with
dazzling boldness against the vague and ashy blue of the distant
sphere beyond; behind them, Nagasaki is spread out in a bird's-eye
view, faintly outlined in the transparent darkness with myriads of
little colored lights, and the extravagantly dented profile of the
mountains is delineated on the starlit sky, blue upon blue,
transparency upon transparency. A corner of the harbor is also
visible, high up, undefined like a lake lost in the clouds; the water
faintly illumined by a ray of moonlight shining forth like a sheet of
silver.

Around us the long crystal trumpets keep up their gobble. Groups of
polite and frivolous persons pass and repass like fantastic shadows:
childish bands of small-eyed mousmes with smile so candidly
meaningless and chignons shining through their bright silver flowers;
ugly men waving at the end of long branches their eternal lanterns
shaped like birds, gods or insects.

Behi