A stop is made at a dark pagoda, where the coffin is temporarily left. This pagoda is so surrounded with foliage that it seems at first as though one were simply entering a garden of cedars, willows, and white lilacs; but soon the eye distinguishes behind and above this verdure other rarer and more magnificent foliage, carved by the Chinese for their gods in the form of clusters of maple or of bamboo, which form under the ceiling a high arbor of gold. And here this curious funeral comes to an end. The groups divide, sorting themselves according to nations, and soon disperse among the hot wooded walks in the direction of their various palaces. * * * * * The setting of the Yellow City seems vaster, more extensive than ever in the April light. One is bewildered by so much artificiality. How marvellous the genius of these people has been! To have created bodily, in the midst of an arid plain, a lifeless desert, a city twenty leagues in circumference, with aqueducts, woods, rivers, mountains, and lakes! To have created forest distances and watery horizons, to give their sovereigns illusions of freshness! And to have enclosed all this,--which in itself is so large that one cannot see its boundaries,--to have separated it from the rest of the world, to have sequestered it, if one may use the word, behind such formidable walls! What their most audacious architects have not been able to create, nor their proudest emperors, is a real springtime in this parched land,--a spring like ours, with its warm rains and its tremendously rapid growth of grass, ferns, and flowers. Here there is no turf, no moss, no odorous hay; the springtime resurrection is indicated here by the thin foliage on the willows, by tufts of grass here and there, or by the blossoming of a sort of purple gillyflower that springs up out of the dusty soil. It rains only in June, and then there is a deluge flooding all things. * * * * * Poor Yellow City, where we walk this morning, meeting so many people, so many armed detachments, so many uniforms; poor Yellow City, closed to the world for so many centuries, an inviolable refuge for the rites and mysteries of the past; city of splendor, oppression, and silence! When I saw it in the autumn it had an air of desertion which suited it; but now I find it overrun by the soldiers of all Europe. In all the palaces and golden pagodas "barbarian" troopers drag their swords or groom their horses under the very noses of the great dreamy Buddhas. * * * * *