All this Sentaro soon found out by talking to the islanders. He found
himself, according to his ideas, in the land of _Topsy-turvydom_.
Everything was upside down. He had wished to escape from dying. He had
come to the land of Perpetual Life with great relief and joy, only
to find that the inhabitants themselves, doomed never to die, would
consider it bliss to find death.
What he had hitherto considered poison these people ate as good
food, and all the things to which he had been accustomed as food they
rejected. Whenever any merchants from other countries arrived, the
rich people rushed to them eager to buy poisons. These they swallowed
eagerly hoping for death to come so that they might go to Paradise.
But what were deadly poisons in other lands were without effect in
this strange place, and people who swallowed them with the hope of
dying, only found that in a short time they felt better in health
instead of worse.
Vainly they tried to imagine what death could be like. The wealthy
would have given all their money and all their goods if they could but
shorten their lives to two or three hundred years even. Without any
change, to live on forever, seemed to this people wearisome and sad.
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