What with the difficulties of travelling, what with the work there is to do, and what with the custom of Lent, everyone stays at home. It is the time for prayer, for fasting, for improving the soul. Many men during these months will live even as the monks live, will eat but before mid-day, will abstain from tobacco. There are no plays during Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time for preparing the land for the crop; it is the time for preparing the soul for eternity. The congregations on the Sundays will be far greater at this time than at any other; there will be more thought of the serious things of life.
It is a very long Lent--three months; but with the full moon of October comes the end. The rains then are over; the great black bank of clouds that walled up all the south so long is gone. The south wind has died away, and the light, fresh north wind is coming down the river. The roads are drying up, the work in the fields is over for a time, awaiting the ripening of the grain. The damp has gone out of the air, and it is very clear. You can see once more the purple mountains that you have missed so long; there is a new feeling in the wind, a laughter in the sunshine, a flush of blossom along the fields like the awakening of a new joy. The rains are gone and the cool weather is coming; Lent is over and gladness is returned; the crop has been sown, and soon will come the reaping. And so at this full moon of October is the great feast of the year. There are other festivals: of the New Year, in March, with its water-throwing; of each great pagoda at its appointed time; but of all, the festival at the end of Lent is the greatest.
Wherever there are great pagodas the people will come in from far and near for the feast. There are many great pagodas in Burma; there is the Arakan pagoda in Mandalay, and there was the Incomparable pagoda, which has been burnt; there are great pagodas at Pegu, at Prome, at many other places; but perhaps the greatest of all is the Shwe Dagon at Rangoon.
You see it from far away as you come up the river, steaming in from the open sea, a great tongue of flame before you. It stands on a small conical hill just behind the city of Rangoon, about two miles away from the wharves and shipping in the busy river. The hill has been levelled on the top and paved into a wide platform, to which you ascend by a flight of many steps from the gate below, where stand the dragons. This entrance-way is all roofed over, and the pillars and the ceiling are red and painted. Here it was that much fighting took place in the early wars, in 1852 especially, and many men, English and Burmese, were killed in storming and defending this strong place. For it had been made a very strong place, this holy place of him who taught that peace was the only good, and the defences round about it are standing still. Upon the top of this hill, the flat paved top, stands the pagoda, a great solid tapering cone over three hundred feet high, ending in an iron fretwork spire that glitters with gold and jewels; and the whole pagoda is covered with gold--pure leaf-gold. Down below it is being always renewed by the pious offerings of those who come to pray and spread a little gold-leaf on it; but every now and then it is all regilt, from the top, far away above you, to the golden lions that guard its base. It is a most wonderful sight, this great golden cone, in that marvellous sunlight that bathes its sides like a golden sea. It seems to shake and tremble in the light like a fire. And all about the platform, edging it ere it falls away below, are little shrines, marvels of carven woodwork and red lacquer. They have tapering roofs, one above another, till they, too, end in a golden spire full of little bells with tongues. As the wind blows the tongues move to and fro, and the air is full of music, so faint, so clear, like 'silver stir of strings in hollow shells.'