Page:Eliza Scidmore--Jinrikisha days in Japan.djvu/349

 The castle is the great show-place of Osaka, and although the palace, which was the heart of the great fortress, was burned in 1868, much remains to be seen. The area enclosed by the massive outer walls and the great moat is immense, and the clustered towers, and buildings, crowning the one elevation on all the Osaka plain, show commandingly from every point. The angles of the walls are sharpened and curve inward like the bow of a battleship, and on each corner remain quaint white towers with curving black roofs piled one upon another. The castle walls are wonders of masonry; single stones forty-six feet in length and ten or twelve feet square being built in on either side of the main gate. Other stones, twenty feet in height, and roughhewn as they came from the quarry, stand at angles of the walls like miniature El Capitans. Nearly all these titanic blocks are known to the Japanese by particular names, each with its legends attached; but the foreigner puzzles long to decide how those primitive builders brought such masses of granite from the quarries on the island of Kiushiu and placed them in these walls without the aid of steam or modern appliances. Three massive walls of defense, one within another, separate the castle proper from the surrounding barracks and parade-ground, and the headquarters are within the third enclosure. A dapper little lieutenant in spotless white uniform received our party at the temple-like headquarters building, one scorching August morning, and conducted us through a fourth wall, and up broad stone stair-ways to the lookout of the old citadel. His orderly ran ahead with field-glasses, and from that airy perch, three hundred feet above the city, we could look over an immense stretch of country and down upon the city roof-tops, from which the air rose quivering with heat. At eight o’clock in the morning at that high point the air was intensely hot, and the stones seemed to scorch our feet; yet up there was a well of deliciously cool water, 333