seemed still undecided.  Life was there; but it was hidden under the luxuriance of the overgrowth, hidden to casual passers-by like the life of insects.  Only by the seaside, where the houses were clustered together above a seawall of cyclopean stones, and on the beach, where the long narrow boats, sharp-prowed and piratical, were drawn up to the shore, the same gnome-like little men, with a generous display of naked brown limbs, were sawing and hammering and mending their nets.

The steamer glided up the fiord towards a cloud of black smoke ahead.  Unknown to Geoffrey, it passed the grey Italianate Catholic cathedral, the shrine of the old Christian faith of Japan planted there by Saint Francis Xavier four hundred years ago.  Anchor was cast off the island of Deshima, now moored to the mainland, where during the locked centuries the Dutch merchants had been permitted to remain in profitable servitude.  Deshima has now been swallowed up by the Japanese town, and its significance has shifted across the bay to where the smoke and din of the Mitsubishi Dockyard prepare romantic visitors for the modern industrial life of the new Japan.  Night and day, the furnace fires are roaring; and ten thousand workmen are busy building ships of war and ships of peace for the Britain of the Pacific.

The quarantine officers came on board, little, brown men in uniform, absurdly self-important.  Then the ship was besieged by a swarm of those narrow, primitive boats called sampan, which Loti has described as a kind of barbaric gondola, all jostling each other to bring merchants of local wares, damascene, tortoise-shell, pottery and picture post cards aboard the vessel, and to take visitors ashore.

Geoffrey and Asako were among the first to land.  The moment of arrival on Japanese soil brought a pang of disappointment.  The sea-front at Nagasaki seemed very like a street in any starveling European town.  It presented a line of offices and consulates built in Western style, without distinction and without charm.  Customs’ officers and policemen squinted suspiciously at the strangers.  A few women, in charge of children or market-baskets, stared blankly.

“Why, they are wearing kimonos!” exclaimed Asako, “but how dirty and dusty they are.  They look as though they had been sleeping in them!”

The Japanese women, indeed, cling to their national dress.  But to the Barringtons, landing at Nagasaki, they seemed ugly, shapeless and dingy.  Their hair was greasy and unkempt.  Their faces were stupid and staring.  Their figures were hidden in the muffle of their dirty garments.  Geoffrey had been told they have baths at least once a day, but he was inclined to doubt it.  Or else, it was because they all bathed in the same bath and their ablutions were merely an exchange of grime.  But where were those butterfly girls, who dance with fan and battledore on our cups and saucers?

The rickshaws were a pleasant experience, the one-man perambulators; and the costume of the rickshaw-runners was delightful, and their gnarled, indefatigable legs.  With their tight trunk-hose of a coarse dark-blue material and short coat to match like an Eton jacket and with their large, round mushroom hats, they were like figures from the crowd of a Flemish Crucifixion.