Page:The passing of Korea.djvu/542

 Various functions. In order to witness the pageant to best advantage, one must secure in advance the upper story of one of the Very few two-story buildings on the Great Bell Street, which tuns through the centre of the town.

At midnight a small company of foreigners sallied out and made their way down through the crowded streets to the building that they had preempted. A perfect sea of lanterns showed the innumerable throng hurrying to their places of observation. Soon after we had secured our places a sudden hush in the surging, screaming crowd told us that the vanguard of the procession was. at hand. The people pressed to the sides of the street and stood perfectly quiet. This great thoroughfare is about one hundred feet wide, and gives ample opportunity for the full display of such a pageant. Looking far up the street to the left, we could see the advance runners of the funeral cortège moving slowly down between two solid walls of hushed humanity. First came a number of torch-bearers, whose duty it was to light the great brush torches that are planted at intervals all down the avenue. These torches are as thick as a man's body and ten feet high; and as they flickered, crackled and then sent up a spire of lurid, smoky flame, they seemed to turn everything blood-red, and made the advancing ranks of the procession look more like a company of fiends than of human beings.

The main body of the procession was flanked on either side by a line of soldiers who carried in lieu of muskets silk flags embroidered with Chinese characters. Some of them bore long paddles, with which they were supposed to keep the crowd back if it pressed too close. The first division of the procession itself was composed of thirteen large sedan chairs draped in red, blue and green brocaded silks, and borne on the shoulders of a dozen carriers whose liveries were pink and white. These chairs are supposed to carry the thirteen historians whose duty it is to write the achievements of the deceased. The absolute silence with which these figures glide by adds much to the weirdness and solemnity of the occasion. The road is not paved, and their