“Through the city to a place I know on a hill,” replied Leslie.
He had called four rikshas from the stand, and he gave some directions to the riksha men, and they started.
You cannot imagine the size of Nagasaki till you drive through it in a swift-running riksha, nor the quaintness, nor the terror that causes your heart to fly upwards as your riksha man shaves a baby, not with a razor, but with the off wheel.
Boy babies fighting tops, girls bouncing colored balls, flights of children whose clogs clatter like the dominoes in an Italian restaurant as they pursue each other in some mysterious game—everywhere children, a shifting, colored maze in which the eye gets tangled and lost. Babies, temples, tea-houses, streets upon streets of houses that look as if you could flatten them out with the blows of a shovel, bursts of cherry-blossoms, tripping Mousmés, stone monsters, awful, yet pathetic with the gray of lichen and the green of moss, a courtyard with a twisted fir tree leaning across it, laughter, and the tune of a chamécen running through it all, that is the impression that a riksha ride through Nagasaki in spring would leave on the mind, were not the picture blurred by the European element.
Street after street they passed through, and still the mysterious city kept building up streets before them. Leslie had thought of taking his companions to the O Suwa, but he had changed his mind and given other directions to the riksha men.
They passed up a steep incline, dark with fir trees, and drew up at a great gateway consisting of two joists of wood supporting a vast beam, the whole making a figure something in the fashion of the Greek II.
Beyond the gateway lay an inclined path, bordered by cryptomeria trees, leading to the façade of a temple.
“It’s a place I sometimes come to,” said Leslie, as he helped Jane to descend. “It’s quiet, and worth seeing in its way.”
Campanula and George du Telle led the way this time, Leslie and his companion leisurely following.
“Come down this path,” said Jane, turning to a side alley. “Oh, how pretty! and how mournful too, with those rows of dark trees. Dick, this is not a cemetery you have brought us to?”