The cuckoo-man proved to be a horrid extortioner; but I was hot and uncomfortable till I got outside, and was a bog-trotting Briton once more. You have never blundered into the inside of a three-hundred-dollar cabinet, therefore you will not understand me. We came to the foot of a hill, as it might have been the hill on which the Shway Dagon stands, and up that hill ran a mighty flight of grey, weather-darkened steps, spanned here and there by monolithic _torii_. Every one knows what a _torii_ is. They have them in Southern India. A great King makes a note of the place where he intends to build a huge arch, but being a King does so in stone, not ink--sketches in the air two beams and a cross-bar, forty or sixty feet high, and twenty or thirty wide. In Southern India the cross-bar is humped in the middle. In the Further East it flares up at the ends. This description is hardly according to the books, but if a man begins by consulting books in a new country he is lost. Over the steps hung heavy blue-green or green-black pines, old, gnarled, and bossed. The foliage of the hillside was a lighter green, but the pines set the keynote of colour, and the blue dresses of the few folk on the steps answered it. There was no sunshine in the air, but I vow that sunshine would have spoilt all. We climb for five minutes,--I and the Professor and the camera,--and then we turned, and saw the roofs of Nagasaki lying at our feet--a sea of lead and dull-brown, with here and there a smudge of creamy pink to mark the bloom of the cherry trees. The hills round the town were speckled with the resting-places of the dead, with clumps of pine and feathery bamboo. "What a country!" said the Professor, unstrapping his camera. "And have you noticed, wherever we go there's always some man who knows how to carry my kit? The _gharri_ driver at Moulmein handed me my stops; the fellow at Penang knew all about it, too; and the 'rickshaw coolie has seen a camera before. Curious, isn't it?" "Professor," said I, "it's due to the extraordinary fact that we are not the only people in the world. I began to realise it at Hong-Kong. It's getting plainer now. I shouldn't be surprised if we turned out to be ordinary human beings, after all."