Pursuing the path that winds past our, dwelling, one passes a dozen
or more old villas, a few garden-walls, and then sees nothing but the
lonely mountain-side, with little paths winding upward toward the summit
through plantations of tea, bushes of camellias, underbrush, and rocks.
The mountains round Nagasaki are covered with cemeteries; for centuries
and centuries they have brought their dead up here.
But there is neither sadness nor horror in these Japanese sepulchres;
it seems as if, among this frivolous and childish people, death itself
could not be taken seriously. The monuments are either granite Buddhas,
seated on lotus, or upright tombstones with inscriptions in gold. They
are grouped together in little enclosures in the midst of the woods, or
on natural terraces delightfully situated, and are usually reached by
long stairways of stone carpeted with moss. Sometimes 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.
Above us, the tombs of our mountain are of an antiquity so hoary that
they no longer alarm any one, even at 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.