“It is practically,” says a recent writer, “a city of the dead; but as a religious city, it is certainly the most remarkable and interesting in the world, not excepting Mecca, Kieff or Benares. For eight miles along the river bank, and extending to a distance of two miles inland, the whole surface is thickly studded with pagodas of all sizes and shapes, and the very ground is so thickly covered with crumbling remnants of vanished shrines, that according to the popular saying, you cannot move foot or hand without touching a sacred thing. A Burmese proverb says there are 9,999. This may or may not be true; but in any case it is certain that an area of sixteen square miles is practically covered with holy buildings. They are of every form of architecture and in every stage of decay, from the newly built fane glittering in white and gold, with freshly bejewelled umbrella on its spire, to the mere tumulus of crumbling brick, hardly to be distinguished now from a simple mound of earth.” They are also of very various sizes, some of them being fine and imposing buildings, and others very small. What a weird sight it was, in the dim twilight of the early morning, to see from the upper deck of the steamer, passing before us like a panorama for eight miles, the towering growths of many centuries of vain offerings, of useless and unavailing endeavours. All was dark and gloomy; mist and the dim twilight covered everything. It was the abode of the dead. Those pagodas were the memorials of a dead faith, and all the self-sacrifice that produced them was but elaborate self-seeking. The buildings seen in the distance put me in mind of a cathedral city, but it was a chilling thought that amid all that grim and solitary vastness there were neither worshippers nor worship—nothing, in fact, but a dreary waste of pagodas, most of them in various stages of decay. A subsequent visit to Pagân, and the more leisurely survey of this marvellous place, made one feel still more the sadness of the spectacle of this untold expenditure of property and labour, and the result neither honour to God nor benefit to man. Such is human “merit,” and such are all attempts to accumulate a store of it. [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO A BURMESE PAGODA.] It is a curious feature about pagodas that though so many are seen going to decay they still continue to build. The explanation of this is that the work of special merit is to build a pagoda, and no special merit attaches to the work of restoration or repair, except in the cases of the few pagodas of great renown, which are greatly resorted to by worshippers and pilgrims. On the morning of the fourth day from Prome we reached Mandalay. Here we met the Rev. J. H. Bateson, who had arrived three weeks before, having come out from England in the capacity of Wesleyan chaplain to the Upper Burma Field Force.