Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/107

Rh galee, and mainly the Burman of the Irrawaddy.

"When the Annalee was anchored over against the timber-yards, I said to myself:

Rangoon? Pagoda? Why, Green Dragons and Gainly Jones!' and I wondered if he was there to be asked: 'How's business? How's the dyspeptic soul?' Had he an office, maybe, near the custom-house, and did he export gold-leaf and bronze images of Buddha? One might find the Temple of the Green Dragons and inquire. I followed a broad street leading to the right, for nearly a mile. It grew wooded. Gateways with carved stone posts and plaster griffins took the place of shops, and behind them you could see the slanting roofs of the monasteries, and their towers strung to the top with rows of little roofs. A stream of people moved drowsily in the road—monks in yellow robes, with their right shoulders bare; women with embroidered skirts; men with similar skirts; men with tattooed legs; men in straw hats with dangling brims; covered carts looking like sunbonnets on wheels, and pulled by hump-necked oxen; little skylarking children; Chinamen and black-bearded Hindoos. It's the procession of the East, which you gape at forever, but don't make out.

"Then I saw a stone stairway going up the side of the hill. So I went on, staring ahead at the shining cone in the air, and getting bewildered to see near by the quantity of dancing statues on the roofs of the temples that crowded the hill, and the acres of tangled carving. So I came to the foot of the stair.

"Close on the right was a gateway in a white wall, and on either side a green lacquer dragon that had enamelled goggle-eyes and expression ridiculous, but a size that called for respect. The gateway led under a row of roofs held up by shiny pillars. Over the wall you could see a gilded cone pagoda with a bell on top. It looked pretty inside the gate, a gardenplace of flowers and trees and little white and gold buildings. A yellow-robed old man sat under a roof near the gate, with some children squatted around. He wasn't Gainly Jones. He didn't look as if an inquiry for Gainly Jones would start anything going in his mind. There were a faint tinkle of bells and the far-off mutter of a gong.

"Anyway, there were green dragons, and I went in, thinking of the years gone—of Fu Shan, who sat sucking his porcelain and ivory pipe on Jones's porch, looking down on the creek where the boys were rowing with his countrymen: looking down on Saleratus, that unkempt community, and saying, 'Vely good joss-house, gleen dlagon joss-house, by Langoon'; and then Gainly Jones: 'Stuck-up little blanked heathen! Speak up, Asia, if you got any medicine for the hopeless.'

"In the cone pagoda there were people praying on the floor, and it was ringed with bronze and lacquer Buddhas, standing, sitting, and lying, that all smiled—three hundred identical smiles. Then I came to a small temple on a mound—just a pointed roof on a little circle of white