The country now became exceedingly fruitful and populous, and almost a continued row of towns and villages. In one of these villages there lived in a monastery an old gray monk, fourscore years of age, and a native of Nagasaki. “He had spent,” says Kämpfer, “the greatest part of his life in holy pilgrimages, running up and down the country, and visiting almost all the temples of the Japanese empire. The superstitious vulgar had got such a high notion of his holiness, that even in his lifetime they canonized and reverenced him as a great saint, to the extent of worshipping his statue, which he caused to be carved of stone, exceeding in this even Alexander the Great, who had no divine honors paid him during his life. Those of his countrymen who were of our retinue did not fail to run thither to see and pay their respects to that holy man.” The Dutch company lodged at Kanagawa, a town of six hundred houses, twenty-four miles from the capital. The coast of the bay appeared at low water to be of a soft clay, furnishing abundance of shell-fish and of certain sea-weeds, which were gathered and prepared for food. The road the next day (Tuesday, March 13), still hugging the shore, led on through a fruitful and populous district, in which were several fishing villages, the bay abounding with fish. As they approached Shinagawa, they passed a place of public execution, offering a show of human heads and bodies, some half putrefied and others half devoured—dogs, ravens, crows, and other ravenous beasts and birds, uniting to satisfy their appetites on these miserable remains.[24] Shinagawa, immediately adjoining Yedo, of which it forms a sort of outer suburb, consisted of one long, irregular street, with the bay on the right and a hill on the left, on which stood some temples. Some few narrow streets and lanes turned off from the great one towards these temples, some of which were very spacious buildings, and all pleasantly seated, adorned within with gilt idols, and without with large carved images, curious gates, and staircases of stone leading up to them. One of them was remarkable for a magnificent tower, four stories high. “Though the Japanese,” says Kämpfer, “spare no trouble nor expense to adorn and beautify their temples, yet the best fall far short of that loftiness, symmetry, and stateliness, which is observable in some of our European churches.”