Burma is the land of pagodas. These places of worship are the most striking feature of every landscape. Their bell-shaped domes, startlingly white, or so covered with gold-leaf as to shine resplendent in the sunlight, crown many a hilltop and constitute the chief beauty of the towns. The pagodas are usually solid structures of brick, with facings of plaster, and they are buildings at which, rather than in which, worship is offered. There are exceptions, however. The more ancient of these edifices, like the Ananda at Pagan, have inner chambers enshrining gigantic statues of Buddha, with corridors around the chambers, quite comparable to the aisles of English or French cathedrals. But the greatest of all the Burmese pagodas, the Shwe Dagon of Rangoon, is a solid mass of brick, with no interior cell, yet enormous in size, erected on a broad platform one hundred and sixty-six feet from the ground, towering to an additional height of two hundred and seventy feet, and crowned with a jewelled "umbrella" at the total elevation of four hundred and thirty-six feet above the teeming streets of the city below. The main platform from which the pagoda proper rises is an immense court nine hundred feet long by six hundred and eighty-five feet wide, and crowded with minor pagodas and shrines. This great esplanade is approached from the four points of the compass by long covered arcades, lined with shops in which offerings of every description can be bought. On the marble floor of the main court and before the minor shrines these offerings are presented by scores of worshipers prostrating themselves before statues of Buddha of every size. And yet the great conical or bell-shaped dome of the pagoda is its chief attraction, for this is covered with gold-leaf from its base to its summit, and its shining splendor salutes the traveler from miles and miles away.