Chapter 15

One of the monks of Yu-jom-sa

This great cliff-carved Buddha, fifty feet high and thirty broad, was done by Chinese artists centuries ago. Note my carrier, a full-sized man, squatting at the lower left-hand corner

The carved Buddhas of Sam-pul-gam, at the entrance to the gorge of the Inner Kongo, were chiseled by a famous Korean monk five hundred years ago

The camera can at best give only a suggestion of the sheer white rock walls of Shin Man-mul-cho, perhaps the most marvelous bit of scenery in the Far East

The booming of a great bell struck by the end of a suspended log called for gayer and more elaborate garments in which monks and novices sat and rocked as they chanted through the evening service on the papered floors of several of the main buildings. Meanwhile I had been called back to my room and served supper. There must have been at least twenty courses, or, rather, different dishes, to the meal, including no meat, but with more examples of the really excellent performances of the Korean cook than I had ever tasted elsewhere. Even tea was served, though up to quite recent years Koreans never drank it. Best of all, the attendants and idlers did not come to sit and watch me eat, like some wild animal in a cage, but withdrew when I had been served and did not intrude again until I lighted my evening cigar. Then a group of us strolled down to the bridge across the brawling stony river and chatted in the language of signs until night blotted out the evergreen wooded mountains that pile up close on every hand above this delightful refuge from the silly babble of the world.

It is true that a quartet of Japanese noisily smoked and gambled most of the night away on the other side of a thin partition, but these are afflictions against which Koreans have no effective weapons. My attendants actually left the door open all night; but, oh, the unspeakable hardness of a Korean floor serving as a bed! Breakfast was almost as generous as the evening meal, yet as I recall it I paid, at a roundabout suggestion from my hosts, only two or threeyenfor the full accommodations of myself and guide.

Sometime during that morning we came upon the mightiest of the carved Buddhas in the Diamond Mountains, in a wild and utterly uninhabited ravine through which we were descending from another slowly attained summit covered with reeking wet half-jungle. The image was cut in deep relief on the face of a cliff, and is so mammoth that my companion, squatting at a corner of it, looks like a fly-speckon the picture I took. At noon we were the guests of the score of monks of Makayun-an, the largest of the cloisters, as Yu-jom-sa is of the temples. A useless, perhaps, but certainly a gentle life these sturdy white-clad fellows with the shaven heads lead at the sheer foot of one of the most perpendicular peaks of the Inner Kongo. There are other cloisters far more inaccessible, some which almost never see visitors. One, I recall, on that afternoon down the magnificent Gorge of the Thousand Cascades, was set so sheer on the vertical mountain-side that a post, which seemed to be of iron and was surely a hundred feet long, under a corner of the building was all that kept it from pitching headlong into the abyss along which we scrambled our way far below.

I have said enough, no doubt, but no visitor to the Diamond Mountains should hurry back to drab reality until he has climbed by finger-nails and eyelids into that maze of white granite crags, like a hundred gigantic Woolworth Buildings designed by no earthly architect, which the Koreans call Shin Man-mul-cho. It rained more or less all the time we were risking our lives and all but bursting our lungs to reach even some of the slighter elevations of this fairy-land, but it would have been a strange offshoot of the human race who would have considered a mere soaking and the day’s toil of a galley-slave a high price to pay for the sights that were conferred upon us. My coolie carrier himself, though he had been there more than once before, was as averse to turning back, even long after it would have been wisdom to do so, as was the bedraggled and ragged Westerner who accompanied him.

Then, if there is time enough left after throwing away the tatters to which any proper excursion into Kongo-san will reduce the stoutest garments endurable there in summer, and the substitution of something less exposing, one should have a glimpse of the Sea Kongo, where islands that are like peaks of the fantastic mountains farther inland dot the route over which ply in the summer season crude conveyances that in real life are fishing-boats.

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