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.