ch must have meant:
"Where to, sir?" To which I reply in the same language, "To the
_Garden of Flowers_, my friend."

I said this in the three words I had parrot-like learnt by heart,
astonished that such sounds could mean anything, astonished too at
their being understood. We started off, he running at full speed, I
dragged along by him, jerked about in his light chariot, wrapped in
oiled cloth, shut up as if in a box;--both of us unceasingly drenched
all the while, and dashing all around us the water and mud of the
sodden ground.

"To the _Garden of Flowers_," I had said, like an habitual frequenter
of the place, and quite surprised at hearing myself speak. But I was
less ignorant about Japan than might have been supposed. Many of my
friends had, on their return home from that country, told me about it,
and I knew a great deal; the _Garden of Flowers_ is a _tea-house_, an
elegant rendezvous. There, I would inquire for a certain
Kangourou-San, who is at the same time interpreter, washerman, and
confidential agent for the intercourse of races. Perhaps this very
evening, if all went well, I should be introduced to the bride
destined to me by mysterious fate. This thought kept my mind on the
alert during the panting journey we have been making, the djin and
myself, one dragging the other, under the merciless downpour.

* * * * *

Oh, what a curious Japan I saw that day, through the gaping of my
oil-cloth coverings! from under the dripping hood of my little cart! A
sullen, muddy, half-drowned Japan. All these houses, men or beasts,
hitherto only known to me by drawings; all these, that I had beheld
painted on blue or pink backgrounds of fans or vases, now appeared to
me in their hard reality, under a dark sky, with umbrellas and wooden
shoes, with tucked-up skirts and pitiful aspect.

At moments the rain fell so heavily that I tightly closed up every
chink and crevice, and the noise and shaking benumbed me, so that I
completely forgot in what country I was. In the hood of the cart were
holes, through which little streams ran down my back. Then,
remembering that I was going for the first time in my life through the
very heart of Nagasaki, I cast an inquiring look outside, at the risk
of receiving a douche: we were trotting along through a mean, narrow
little back street (there are thousands like it, a perfect labyrinth
of them) the rain falling in cascades from the tops of the roofs on