In order to reach it we first cross the eastern market-place, three or four kilometres through a sunless and desolate Pekin,--a Pekin that bears the marks of war and defeat, and where things are spread out for sale on the filth and ashes of the ground. Some matchless objects transmitted by one generation of mandarins to another are to be found among the rags and old iron; ancient palaces, as well as the houses of the poor, have emptied here some of their most astonishing contents; the sordid and the marvellous lie side by side,--here some pestilential rags, there a bibelot three thousand years old. Along the walls of the houses as far as one can see, the cast-off garments of dead men and women are hung. It is a place for the sale of extravagant clothing without end, opulent furs from Mongolia stolen from the rich, gay costumes of a courtesan, or magnificent heavy silk robes which belonged to great ladies who have disappeared. The Chinese populace, who have done a hundred times more than the invaders in the way of pillage, burning, and destruction in Pekin, the uniformly dirty populace, dressed in blue cotton, with squinting, evil eyes, swarm and crawl about, eagerly searching and raising a perfect cloud of microbes and dust. Ignoble scoundrels with long queues circulate amongst the crowd, offering robes of ermine or blue-fox, or admirable sables for a few piasters, in their eagerness to be rid of stolen goods. * * * * * As we approach the object of our journey it grows more quiet; the busy, crowded streets are gradually succeeded by streets that have perished of old age, where there are no passers; grass grows on the thresholds and behind abandoned walls; we see trees with branches knotted like the arms of the aged. We dismount before a crumbling entrance which seems to open into a park which might be a ghosts' walk; and this is the entrance to the temple. What sort of a reception shall we have in this mysterious enclosure? We do not know; and at first there is no one to receive us. But the chief of the Lamas soon appears, bowing, with his keys, and we follow him across the funereal park. With a violet dress, a shaven head, and a face like old wax, at once smiling, frightened, and hostile, he conducts us to a second door, opening into an immense court paved with white stones, completely surrounded by the curious walls of the first buildings of the temple. Their foundations are massive, their roofs curved and forked, the walls themselves awe-inspiring on account of their size, and hermetically sealed; and all this is the color of ochre and rust, with golden reflections thrown on the high roofs by the evening sun.