Thence through Yei-tan, they came to Kéku-shiu, another famous old seat of Shinra’s ancient grandeur. The beautiful situation and rich appearance of the city charmed the invaders, who lingered long in the deserted streets before applying the torch. The “three hundred thousand houses of the people” were clustered around the great Buddhist temple in the centre. The clock-tower, eighteen stories high, was especially admired. The massive swinging beam by which the tongueless bells, or gongs, of the Far East are made to boom out the hours, struck against a huge bronze lotus eight or nine feet in diameter. This sacred flower of the Buddhist emblem of peace and calm in Nirvana had in Corean art taken the place of the suspended bell, being most probably a cup-shaped mass of metal set with mouth upright, or like a bell turned upside down—such being the form often seen in the temples of Chinese Asia. Again did antiquity, religion, or the promptings of mercy fail to restrain the invaders. Securing what spoils they cared for, everything else was burned up. After camping at Kiran, they reached the sea-coast, at Uru-san, November 18th. CHAPTER XIX. THE SIEGE OF URU-SAN CASTLE. The Japanese now took up the spade as their immediate weapon of defence against the infuriated Coreans and the avenging Chinese. A force of twenty-three thousand men was at once set to work, “without regard to wind or rain,” along the lines marked out by the Japanese engineers. To furnish the wood for towers, gates, huts, and engines, a party of two thousand axemen and laborers, guarded by twenty-eight mounted pickets and three hundred matchlock men, with seven flags, went daily into the forest. The winter huts were hastily erected, walls thrown up, ditches dug, towers built, and sentinels and watch stations set. The work went on from earliest daybreak till latest twilight, the carpenters so suffering from the cold that “their finger nails dropped off.” By the first part of January the castle was almost completed. From the eleventh day the garrison took rest. The fortress was three-sided, the south face lying on the sea. The total line of works was about three and a half miles, pierced by three gates. The inner defences were in three parts, or maru. The third maru, or enclosure, had stone walls, one tower and one gate; the second had two towers, two gates; and the first or chief citadel had stone walls, forty-eight feet high, with two towers and two gates. The war operations, which had hitherto covered large spaces of the country, now found the pivot at this place situated in Kiung-sang, on the sea-coast, thirty-five miles north of Fusan. Another commander, Asano, marched to assist the garrison and entered the castle before the Ming army arrived. His advance guard, while reconnoitring, was defeated by the Coreans, yet he succeeded, by an impetuous charge, in entering the castle.