Around us the long crystal trumpets keep up their gobble.  Groups of polite and frivolous persons pass and repass like fantastic shadows:  childish bands of small-eyed mousmes with smile so candidly meaningless and chignons shining through their bright silver flowers; ugly men waving at the end of long branches their eternal lanterns shaped like birds, gods or insects.

Behind us, in the lit-up and wide-open temple, the bonzes sit, immovable embodiments of doctrine, in the glittering sanctuary inhabited by divinities, chimeras and symbols.  The crowd, monotonously droning its mingled prayers and laughter, presses around them, sowing its alms broadcast; with a continuous jingle, the money rolls on the ground into the precincts reserved to the priests, where the white mats entirely disappear under the mass of many-sized coins accumulated there as after a deluge of silver and bronze.

We, however, feel thoroughly at sea in the midst of this festivity; we look on, we laugh like the rest, we make foolish and senseless remarks in a language insufficiently learned, and which this evening, I know not why, we can hardly understand.  Notwithstanding the night breeze, we find it very hot under our awning, and we absorb quantities of funny-looking water-ices, served in cups, which taste like scented frost, or rather like flowers steeped in snow.  Our mousmes order for themselves great bowls of candied beans mixed with hail,—­real hail-stones such as we would pick up after a hail-storm in March.

Glou! glou! glou! the crystal trumpets slowly repeat their notes, the powerful sonority of which has a labored and smothered sound, as though they came from under water; they mingle with the jingling of rattles and the noise of castanets.  We also have the impression of being carried away in the irresistible swing of this incomprehensible gayety, composed in proportions we can scarcely measure, of elements mystic, puerile and even ghastly.  A sort of religious terror is diffused by the hidden idols divined in the temple behind us; by the mumbled prayers, confusedly heard; above all, by the horrible heads in lacquered wood, representing foxes, which, as they pass, hide human faces,—­hideous livid masks.

In the gardens and outbuildings of the temple the most inconceivable mountebanks have taken up their quarters, their black streamers, painted with white letters, looking like funereal trappings as they float in the wind from the top of their tall flagstaffs.  Hither we turn out steps, as soon as our mousmes have ended their orisons and bestowed their alms.