Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/377

 courses are apparently of more recent structure, and yet old compared with our most venerable European structures. Only the top itself has apparently been restored during the past five centuries. Standing upon this altar-crowned summit, as the ocean wind drives the clouds across the serrated tops of the rugged range one tries to imagine himself back in the days of Abraham, when Tangun stood by and directed the building of this heaventouching altar, and the flames leaped high about his burning hecatombs. The mind faints in the effort to grasp the meaning of four thousand years. Not even China herself, that synonym of cyclopean age, can show as ancient and authentic a memento of the past.

Near this altar, but on another spur of the mountain, is the walled fortress supposed to have been built by the three sons of Tangun. It is occupied to-day by a Buddhist monastery, showing how the magpie may inherit the eagle's nest. Here it was that the Korean tiger-hunters congregated at the time the French landed on Korean soil in 1866, and it was from these ancient battlements that they drove back what they supposed to be the mortal enemies of their fatherland. In the town of Kangdong in the north, there is a mound four hundred and ten feet in circumference, which is believed to contain all that is mortal of that first great ruler, Tangun. In Munwha there is a shrine to the Korean trinity, Whanin, Whanung and Tangun, the first being the creator, the second his son, and the third his earthly incarnation. Our interest in the story is enhanced by the fact that he came to earth in the form of a wind, and was incarnated through the medium of a virgin.

Compared with Tangun, Kija seems almost modern, though in truth he antedated David of Israel. The site of his ancient capital is pointed out beside the modern city of Pyeng-yang, and before the Chinese tore it up for breastworks in the war of 1894, the situation of the streets of that capital were plainly seen, marked out on the plain with almost the regularity of a Western American town. In the middle of it is Kija's Well, believed to