Don Rodrigo soon after set out for Shimo, where he was to take ship. From Suruga to Miyako, estimated at one hundred leagues, the country was mostly level and very fertile. Several considerable rivers were crossed in large ferry-boats by means of a cable stretched from bank to bank. Provisions were very cheap. His idea of the population of the country grew more and more exaggerated. He insists that he did not pass a town of less population than one hundred and fifty thousand; and Miyako, which he considers the largest city in the world, he sets down at one million five hundred thousand.[75] Situated upon a highly cultivated plain, its walls were ten leagues in circuit, as Don Rodrigo ascertained by riding round them on horseback. It took him an entire day. He enters into a number of details about the Dairi and his court. He was powerless, and lived in splendid poverty. The court of the governor of Miyako, who had six vice-governors under him, was scarcely less splendid than that of the emperor. He told Don Rodrigo that this city contained five thousand temples and more than fifty thousand public women. He showed him a temple, the largest building he had seen in Japan, containing statues of all the gods, and another in which was an immense bronze statue, the size of which filled him with astonishment. “I ordered,” he says, “one of my people to measure the thumb of the right hand; but, although he was a person of the ordinary size, he could not quite encircle it with both arms. But the size of the statue is not its only merit; the feet, hands, mouth, eyes, forehead, and other features are as perfect and expressive as the most accomplished painter could make a portrait. When I first visited this temple it was unfinished; more than one hundred thousand men were daily employed upon it. The devil could not suggest to the emperor a surer expedient to get rid of this immense wealth.”[76]