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There was no need for haste, now, and they travelled by easy stages until, by the smoke rising from different parts of the forest, they knew that they were approaching the spot where the Burmese forces lay around Rangoon and, indeed, could see the great pagoda rising above the surrounding country.
Had our advent conferred the order of knighthood upon the host, he could not have received us with more "empressement." He shook us all in turn by the hand, to the number of eight and thirty, and then presented us seriatim to his spouse, a very bejewelled lady of some forty years who, what between bugles, feathers, and her turban, looked excessively like a Chinese pagoda upon a saucer.
A single pagoda, five stories high, reminded us of the peculiar character of Chinese architecture. Our road now lay over fertile eminences, varied with fields and meadows in a high state of cultivation. Many of the hills are used as cemeteries, and are dotted over with small mounds of earth, walled in with stone flags, or rough hewn stones two feet high, frequently covered with inscriptions.
Thus Janet and nurse had succeeded to the management when poor Carey was too ill and wretched to attend to it; and it had gone on in their hands at the Pagoda. Janet was pleased to be respected accordingly by her aunt, who always liked her the best, in spite of her much worse behaviour, for were not her virtues her own, and her vices her mother's?
"I have already informed you that I was born at Benares, which, as you know, is a populous city on the banks of the Ganges, and the most celebrated seat of Hindoo science and literature. My father was a priest of Vishun, of a high rank; and as his functions required him to live within the precincts of the Pagoda, he was liberally maintained out of its ample revenues.
The morning being foggy, the Burmese, who did not see the English approaching, were taken by surprise. They retreated as usual to the pagoda, from whence, by a rush of the troops, they were driven out. The fighting was severe, as no less than six men were killed and thirty-one wounded of the troops. The navy, as usual, did their part well.
The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement how otherwise was it to be named? by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father the least little inch.
Looking intently, here and there might be seen, often built in counterscarp on the very brink of an abyss, some old, tiny, mysterious pagoda; half hidden in the foliage of the overhanging trees; bringing to the minds of new arrivals such as ourselves, the sense of unfamiliarity and strangeness; and the feeling that in this country, the Spirits, the Sylvan Gods, the antique symbols, faithful guardians of the woods and forests, were unknown and uncomprehended.
"Because I should imagine that even the Burmese must be beginning to doubt whether they could defeat our whole force and, as they particularly wish to occupy the pagoda on Friday, they would hardly risk an attack on other points, which might end in disaster while, what with the propitious nature of the day, and the fact that the Invulnerables have undertaken to capture the pagoda, no doubt they look upon that as certain."
There was a delirious sort of Eastern feeling about it a kind of combination of "The Thousand and One Nights" and the "Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyam." The Abbey tower for once seemed out of place, and ought to have changed miraculously into a pagoda or a minaret.
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