Coryndon stood for a moment looking at the entrance, and surveying the huge plaster dragons with their gaping mouths and vermilion-red tongues.  They were ranged up a green slope, two on either side of the brown fretted roof that covered the steep tunnel that led up a flight of more than a hundred steps to the flat plateau, where the golden spire towered high over all, amid a crowd of lesser minarets.

Surrounded by baskets of roses and orchids, little silk-clothed Burmese girls sat on the entrance steps, and sold their wares.  Fitzgibbon would have hurried on, but Coryndon, in true tripper fashion, stopped and bought an armful of blossoms.

“What am I to do with these things?” he asked helplessly.

“Oh, you’d better leave them before one of the Gaudamas, and acquire merit.  If you let them all plunder you like this, we’ll never get to the top.”

Flight after flight, the two men climbed slowly, and Coryndon stood at intervals to watch the crowd that came up and down.  The steps were so steep that the arch above them only disclosed descending feet, but Coryndon watched the feet appear first and then the rest of the hurrying or loitering men and women, and he sat on a seat beside a little gathering of yellow-robed Hypongyis until Fitzgibbon lost all patience.

“There is a whole town of piety to see up at the top.  Come on, man; we have hours of it yet to get through.  Don’t waste time over those stalls.  Every picture of the Buddha story was made in Birmingham.”

Progressing a little faster, Fitzgibbon piloted Coryndon past a stall where yellow candles and bundles of joss-sticks in red paper cases were sold at a varying price.

“I must get some of these,” objected Coryndon, who added a rupee’s worth of incense and a white cheroot to his collection.

When they passed through the last archway and gained the plateau, he looked round with eyes that spoke his keen interest.  Even though he had been there many times before, Coryndon looked at the sight with eyes that grew shadowed by the dreaming soul that lived within him.

Twilight was gathering behind the trees; only the gold-laced spires of a thousand minarets caught the last light of the sun.  On the plateau below the great pillar, that glimmered like a golden sword from base to bell-hung Htee, lay what Fitzgibbon had described as “a little town of piety.”  A village of shrines and Pagodas, each built with seven roofs, open-fronted to disclose the holy place within; some large as a small chapel; some small, giving room only for the figure of the Gaudama.  Here and there, the votive offerings had fallen into decay, and the gold-leaf covering the Buddha was black and dilapidated by the passing of years, for there is no merit to be acquired in rebuilding or renovating a sacred place.  From innumerable shrines, uncounted Buddhas looked out with the same long, contemplative eyes; in bronze, in jade, in white and black marble, in grey stone and gilded ebony, the passionless face of the great Peace looked out upon his children.