SEOUL
"The broad streets seem an immense cemetery, and the mean little flat-roofed houses graves"
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The moon is now shining brightly, but it shows nothing new in the aspect of the road within the walls. The main street of Seoul is as deep in clay and mud as it was at the time when the "waters dried up." Its houses have not altered; they are scarcely more than the clay huts of prehistoric man, his protection against cold or heat.
The first sight of an unknown country stamps itself on our minds in a manner unique, and I requested the bearers of my chair to walk slowly, for I did not wish to lose my first impression. There is a fascination in the unknown—a wonderful interest attached to the unexpected. Our wanderings amongst strange peoples in the streets of a city which we have not visited before are not for the pen to describe.
Everything that is unknown is mysterious, until reality tears aside the veil, and so long as it is built up by our imagination and peopled by fantastic creations it remains to a certain extent a City of Dreams.
The streets are gradually getting broader, and the clay huts grow even more insignificant. I stop for a moment in the great square, which may be the centre of the city, but is little more than a cross-road leading into a few side-streets.
It is scarcely seven o'clock, and yet over all broods a death-like silence, a peaceful calm, as complete as one can imagine. The broad streets seem an immense cemetery, and the mean little flat-roofed houses graves. One might think it is All Saints' Day, for on each grave a little lamp is burning. A lantern hangs from the eaves of each roof, showing a yellowish flame.
But the people themselves are returning like ghosts to their homes, each robed in white—each and all mute. Without a sound they flit over the roads of the endless graveyard, until they disappear into the depths of some one of the illuminated tombs.
I have never been so impressed by any other city I have seen as I was by my first sight of Seoul. As I saw the city just now, by the light of a November moon, dark, dumb, desolate, and ghostly, it resembled some fairy city more than reality; like those storied places sung of in the poetry of almost every people, the tale of which is listened to with such rapture by the little folk of the nursery, who know nothing as yet of life's seamy side.
Such a town was Seoul to me, the first few hours after my arrival.
Next morning I was aroused by the sound of drums and trumpets. But whose? Do they belong to the ghosts? What can have happened that the home of silence should have been disturbed by such an awful uproar?