THE LAND OF THE GODS

“That which I saw seemed to me a smile of the Universe.”

“Paradiso,” canto xxvii.

I ACROSS THE LAGOON

We sat still on the deck, with our backs propped against portions of the ship’s cargo, and watched.

It was necessary to sit still, for a rise of only a few inches would have sent the awning over our heads into the blue waters of the lagoon; and each newcomer, as he stepped from the wharf on to this Kensington Garden craft, doubled himself in two and stayed so. First-class passengers lay flat, for a square hole in the side of the boat opened into a three-feet-high saloon elegantly carpeted; we had matting. When the first half of the passenger was inside, a big-headed boy removed his gheta and piled them up on the deck, reshoeing him in the same way when he emerged. The difficulty of extracting foreign boots in this manner would alone have deterred us from using our first-class tickets; and then the deck passengers under the awning had at least six inches more room, besides ventilation. So we sat on the matting and watched.

Anything out of a toy-shop so tiny as this absurd little steamer was never seen. She might with generosity have been fifteen feet long; yet she carried some twenty passengers besides cargo down the lagoon and up the river, from Matsué to Shobara, with safety and Oriental speed; and did it twice a day too.

The carpeted saloon was reasonably filled with half a dozen passengers; the deck overflowed with the rest. The brown-skinned, bullet-headed, ugly, good-natured Japanese peasant, sitting on his heels with his dark blue kimono tucked up above his brown legs, and his fan in his hand; or his little wife, wrinkled and meek, her white cotton towel, with its bamboo design in blue, folded round her head and tucked up under her hair behind in something between a night-cap and a sun-bonnet; quiet and sweet, but never abject, and always respected. Here and there a shopkeeper or a clerk, or some one from the town in a grey kimono, with a face pale yellow against the other’s brown. We all sat bare-footed on the matting to keep it clean, with our gheta in our hands, fanning ourselves with rice-paper fans decorated with storks flying across the moon, or sprays of plum-blossom or pine-trees, each man of us showing his well-turned leg and thigh, with all the muscles brought into strong relief by the weight of the body on the toes. All polite, all amused, all conversational.

After a great deal of snorting on the part of our very small steamer, we casually left the wharf and shot into the lagoon. Matsué, hidden by the sunlight, disappeared; and even the wide sweep of waters wavered indistinct beneath the hard glitter of the morning light. It was not yet nine o’clock, and already the distant blue shore was blurred with the shimmering heat, and the near green one fitful with the scissor-grinding of the semmi. The heat was dropping down on the world with the swiftness of a tropical night and the glitter of it hurt.

Away over the surface of the waters a red-brown head floated, lazy, the nimbus of straw hat against the light glowing yellow as a halo. Slowly, idly, the head moved over the water, suspended between blue and blue. Too hot to doubt or question or deny, I accepted the head and shut my eyes, only to find on opening them again two, three, a dozen heads strolling slowly over the lagoon.

“Honourably please to understand, dredging for mussels,” said a voice at my elbow. And the passengers repeated the information in a sort of Greek chorus with many bows.

Matsué’s only representative of the vast world of the Ijin San is one missionary; but these peasants, with the refinement of true breeding, accepted our outlandish dress and faces, our boots on their matting too, without a stare of curiosity, although when our attention was apparently absorbed elsewhere, the whiteness of our skins, the aristocratic bridge of our noses (it is only the noblesse in Japan, and not all of them, who possess an aquiline nose), were commented on with interest and admiration.

The near green shore ran in and out, and in and out, wooded thick with the slim green fingers of the bamboo, until it opened into a tiny green bay, with a thin bamboo landing-stage running out into the silent water. Here we stopped with such an amount of “ay-aying” on the part of the captain—a short man in a grey kimono, who sat in a hole in the deck the other side of the funnel reading Chinese poetry—and the crew, a tall youth in “foreign” trousers, who greased wheels, that we might have been an Atlantic liner approaching an unknown shore. There were no passengers for the invisible village behind the landing-stage but the captain, who climbed over the side of the boat up on to the landing-stage, and disappeared.

By-and-by from out of the green there came a charming little figure in a sea-blue kimono, lined with lacquer-red, followed by a maid bearing neatly matted parcels. The crew wiped its hands and moved forward, while the sea-blue kimono, kneeling on the landing-stage, handed down the parcels on to the boat for safe carriage to Shobara. They seemed to require quantities of explanation those parcels, accompanied by irrepressible giggles, principal giggles on the part of the mistress, and secondary giggles on the part of the maid; while the crew listened, replied, grew eloquent. It was one of the most effective flirtations I ever saw, but alas! conducted in that Izumo dialect so hard for the Tokyo-taught foreigner to understand. And it went on like the hum of the semmi, while the water, the world, and the boat drowsed in the heat.

Suddenly, from out of the nowhere, appeared our captain, who swung himself down from the landing-stage on to the boat as imperturbably as a stone Buddha. The sea-blue kimono, still on its knees at the edge of the water, swayed in one last enchanting giggle that showed all the lacquer-red linings in a quiver of flame, while the supplementary giggles of the stout little maid followed us regretfully out of the bay.

With more “ay-aying” we shot back into the hard glitter of the lagoon. The captain retired to his hole and his Chinese poetry, the crew had completely disappeared, but the big-headed boy, emerging from some unknown region behind the captain, carried out a hibachi and a kettle. He set the kettle on the brass tripod over the hibachi and blew up the charcoal fire with a large fan; and we all watched him with interest as he made Japanese tea in a green china teapot, rather larger than the kettle, with a black handle and with dividing lines of black separating the green into leaf-like petals. At this we all sat up, thirstier with anticipation, and the little china bowls filled from the green kettle-teapot vanished from the tray. Then the big-headed boy handed round manju cakes (like boiled chestnuts in a white coat of sweet rice-paste), and collected payment, one sen (a farthing). We all promptly demanded more tea, and the little bowls were filled and refilled until the green kettle-teapot ran dry; and we all subsided again. Only the tink, tink, of the metal pipes, knocking out the glowing wad of tobacco on to the deck in order to light a fresh pipeful from the burning remains of the old one, broke the drowsy silence. Three little whiffs and the acorn bowl of a Japanese pipe is empty, so the tink, tink, of the metal on the deck was rhythmic as the vee-um of the semmi. They were all smoking, men and women, and the scent of the bright brown tobacco, fine-cut as hair, lay under the awning.

The near green shore ran in and out, and in and out, until all the wide sheet of glittering light, spread over the blue waters, lay behind us; in front a bright green bank of rushes hemmed in the light. The lagoon was ended, and still we went on, seemingly with the intention of stranding ourselves among the bulrushes. But the bulrushes stood back as we came on, and ranging themselves on either hand, left a water pathway down which we went, until the bank of rushes following the lagoon lay far behind, and we found ourselves in a narrow river that seemed half natural stream and half artificial canal.

Our unnautical captain, who, ever since we had entered the rushes, had been intoning directions to the invisible crew as though he were reading poetry aloud, got up out of his hole. The tink, tink, of the metal pipes on the wooden deck died gradually away as each smoker knocked out his last wad of tobacco and put away his pipe. Then with a sudden and terrific snort the absurd little steamer, an end in either bank, stood still. The big-headed boy, hanging over the side of the boat, kicked violently with his heels, while the unexpected apparition of the crew’s head rose up at our feet. The head took a look round and sank again, and the engines rattled. Still with an end in either bank, and with the big-headed boy clasping the gunwale in his arms, we proceeded to turn slowly round, and then, assisted by several ropes and several haulers, to back majestically into the main street of Shobara.

Our journey was ended. The big-headed boy, leaving the gunwale, rushed to reshoe the first-class passengers as they wriggled from the saloon on to the roadway. The bullet-headed peasants and their little brown wives bowing low bows to each other, the captain and to the Ijin San, took up their bundles and trudged off, while we, like a Royal arrival, were received by the authorities of Shobara, in the person of a fierce little policeman in a new white suit, and duly escorted the three-and-a-half paces from the ship’s side to the tea-house door in a procession, the people lining up the way.

And the last we saw of that absurd little steamer, as we turned into the tea-house, was a glimpse of the crew looking down the funnel, while the big-headed boy, standing amidships, handed out the cargo to its owners on either bank.

II TO KIZUKI

The green earth lay burning in the sun, wrapt round and round with heat. Between the tall blue lines of hills it stretched, the flat green floor of a deep blue cavern, whose roof-top was the sky. And through the green the long white road ran out of sight. The only living thing that moved was the running kurumaya, all else lay sleeping in the bright night-time of heat, a heavy drugged sleep that neither rested nor refreshed.

Inert the green earth stretched between the blue hills, weighed down with heat; a palpable heat through which we moved as a fish moves through water; a visible heat which was lying there heavy on the land, floating round the blue hills, quivering against the white sky, humming in the still air, rolling in great drops down the bronzed back of the kurumaya, drowsing me to sleep as with the soft waving of a heated fan, a heavy, encompassing heat that stunned.

And always the white road ran on through the green earth, and the long, straight lines of hills on either side shut off the sky.

Between the fields of rice, here and there among the green, a brown-thatched house like an open shed rose up, its roof supported on the square pillars of the four corner posts, its walls rolled out of sight. And on the matted floor the women and children lay sleeping, their necks supported on a narrow stool; the men stretched on their backs, or lying prone, their heads between their arms.

Not a living thing in house or field, in land or road, was moving save the running kurumaya. Heat had slain the world and life itself was senseless.

On either side the straight blue hills stretched out of sight, the green earth lay like a narrow passage-way between; and on and on we ran, until the green floor contracted, and the white road became a broad still street, where brown houses shut out the hills.

A rapid spurt through the empty village, for a kurumaya never stops except at the top of his speed, and we arrive at the tea-house. Dazed, weary, and stiff with two hours of continuous running, we struggle from under the shawls and wraps that keep out the sun, and sink on to the matting; while the crowd which has grown no man knoweth how, from out of an empty village, stands silently, staring. With equal suddenness a small policeman starts up in front. He inquires our names, ages, residence and destination; orders back the crowd with one wave of his arm, commands that we be taken into an inner apartment, remote from public gaze; and, in short, declares we may repose on him.

We are taken into an inner apartment, a room that is almost cool, while the crowd drifts patiently round the house trying to look in. One little wide-eyed nēsan brings us tea, and then house and world sink back into slumber again.

The nēsan, reluctant, but at last dismissed, lies down on the matting, beyond the courtyard, and falls asleep. Her neck rests on a narrow wooden pillow that has the curves of a torī; she lies like a long-stalked flower on the ground, rigid, quite graceful. Every fold of her kimono, every twist of her hair, is in place. She is fast asleep, unconscious, perfectly tidy, with a neatness that has passed into its essence, grace, and is natural as the feathers to a bird.

We cannot sleep, the mere transition from the greater heat outside to the cooler heat of this open matted space makes us wakeful. It is cooler here actually, in degree, and imaginatively, from the green palms of the baby garden. The garden of a doll’s house, which any moderate-sized bath-towel would have roofed, yet with a forest of dwarf palm-trees in one corner, a winding pool in another, the cool grey outlines of a stone lantern to hold the eyes, and a sense of still greenness, of limpid freshness, which not rivers of water or forests of giant trees could more distinctly convey. To look at that garden was to take a mental bath and drown out the sense of heat. But the heat itself remained, intense and stagnant, a heavy presence in the house that permeated all things.

Out in the courtyard one shaft of burning light shone down, turning the cotton towel on its bamboo line to a white-hot banner, the polished passage to a molten pool, while the water in the big stone font was warm as condensed steam. Like the flaming sword of the Archangel Michael, the shaft of burning light cut the passage-way in two, and the sharp white-heat of it seemed to cut. It was absolutely still, only the heat moved awake in a house and a world asleep.

Very slowly the little nēsan sat up; some one had called her. A moment, and she was on her feet, neat as a growing flower.

“The kurumaya awaits,” she said, kneeling on the matting, “when it honourably pleases the august ones to come.”

Then she touched her forehead to the floor and waited for what it honourably pleased the august ones to do.

They came, down the polished passage, under the flaming sword of light, out into the open space before the tea-house, where the little policeman waited to command them to be packed into their kuruma, to deliver stringent orders for their safe conduct to the kurumaya, to authoritatively bid them the politest of sayonara.

The crowd had disappeared, harangued out of existence; the village street was empty as a desert, the houses dead; and then the steep line of blue hills grew up on either side, shutting in the sky, and the long white road stretched away through the green earth.

Palpable, visible, the heat lay over the land, quivering against the white sky, floating round the blue hills, humming in the still air, drowsing me into a somnambulant life that was neither sleep nor waking.

Between the green earth and the white sky the telegraph wires cut a bronze line against the quivering blue; and the rows of little birds, all sitting with their tails to the road, hung drowsily there, rows on rows of them. And still the long white road ran on and on.

Beneath the short thick hair of the kurumaya the heat gathered in wet patches on the white scalp, rolled in big drops over the black head, trickled down the bronze neck, and was wiped off with one rapid movement of the blue cotton towel, as the running kurumaya sped swiftly on; gathered again, rolled again, trickled again, was wiped dry again; gathered, rolled, trickled, until the automatic movements, repeated and repeated, grew part of Time itself. They were Time.

Then I awoke. It was as if some one had slid a thin lining of fresh air along the tops of the blue hills, beneath the burning sky. A thin, thin sheet of fresh air, but the green earth gave a great sigh, the kurumaya a little shake, and I awoke.

The peasants in their brown thatched houses, open as a shed, were stirring, the naked red figures in their white cloths were moving down the road.

In the fields the long bamboo poles that shot up out of the green earth like masts were dipping up and down, drawing water for the thirsty rice.

The little birds on the telegraph wires were chirping sleepily, flying off in twos and threes, and settling down again, audibly fussing over the laziness of their friends and relations.

The bright night-time of heat was over and gone.

I sat up in my kuruma and looked. We were running through green rice-fields, under a blue sky. And it was a hot summer’s afternoon.

III IZUMO’S GREAT TEMPLE

“So they made fast the temple pillars on the nethermost rock-bottom, and they made high the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven;” and the god Onamuji, the “Master of the Great Land,” King of Izumo, in accordance with his compact with high heaven, entered into that temple and dwelt there.

So the province of Izumo and the kingdom of Western Japan passed under the rule of the great Sun-Goddess whose descendants endure to this day. But the Master of the Great Land, the god Onamuji, is worshipped from end to end of the Emperor’s dominions, and his temple and his priests are sacred as the mirror of the Sun-Goddess in their eyes.

All through the year, the pilgrims in thousands journey into Izumo to remote Kizuki, whose name to their ears is still resonant with the beating (tsuku) of the pestles (ki) which made the foundations of that first great temple firm and everlasting, while in the month of October the immortal gods themselves, from every shrine throughout the land, come to visit Onamuji, and that desolate month known in Japan as kami-na-zuki (month without gods) is called in Izumo alone kami-ari-zuki (the month with gods).

At the foot of the everlasting hills the temple stands, and the far-off ripple of the Western Sea, half a memory, half a dream, wanders through its sunlit courts, a sound to listening ears.

The long dark avenue of twisted trees, so old that many are almost limbless, the three giant torī, hewn in solid granite, lie behind us; we have reached the white sunlight of the outer temple space, and the scattered buildings of the shrine are in front. Our landlord, in his Sunday-best kimono of silver-grey, leads the way. He has walked, since we left the inn, exactly three paces behind us, while three paces behind him came our kurumaya. In Kizuki it has not been considered consonant with our dignity to allow us to move anywhere without them.

Our landlord, with the profoundest bow, moves on in front. He has a letter to deliver on our behalf, so that when we reach the long, low building at the end of the first enclosure, an authoritative young priest in long white robes is there to greet us. He wears a wonderful head-dress of black lacquer, the model of a meat-cover, tied on under the chin, with two red cords in the manner of a doll’s bonnet; but his chin is human, not inflexible, so I watch to see the meat-cover tumble. It never does, not even when with a low bow he invites us up the steep polished steps into the room above. We take off our shoes and climb.

The room is long and low, with a “foreign” table covered with a green baize cloth. There are bright blue velvet chairs, an inkstand, pens; just a second-hand committee-room greatly the worse for wear, which impresses our landlord, so that his strangled h’s of admiration sound like paroxysms of coughing. We sit on the velvet chairs and wait. Our landlord, the letter and the priest have disappeared into an inner apartment. And the sound of much discussion comes to our ears. “How far are we to be allowed to go?” And then the terms “learned Ijin San,” and “august sage” reach us. At last they are all agreed. The “learned Ijin San,” the “honourable teacher,” the “august sage” shall be permitted to enter the very Holy of Holies; but the “honourable interior,” being a woman, must not cross the sacred threshold. Then there is a long pause before the authoritative young priest comes out and explains the position to us. We bow the profoundest thanks and follow him down the steps, and the reason for the pause is evident. He has changed his clothes, and is now in the fullest and most resplendent of sacerdotal robes.

Under the shadow of the gate of the ita-gaki, the second enclosing fence, stands the High Priest himself, whose fathers for two thousand years have led the temple rites. He is the eighty-second descendant of the mythic Susa-no-wo, and is still termed by many Iki-gami, which is the “Living God.” An old, old man, whose face is almost white, a mystic sacred face, quiet as the eternal smile of the Eternal Buddha. He wears a lacquered head-dress, the most imposing of meat-covers, and his robes are of white and purple adorned with gold.

We pass within the ita-gaki, and the landlord, the kurumaya, the crowd of other worshippers are left behind. Before us rises the low fence of the “jewelled hedge,” which encloses the sacred shrine itself. Again before the gateway there is a pause. The minor priests, even our authoritative young friend, do not enter here. It is explained to us that the “honourable interior” must not pass within the temple. She is a woman, but it is permitted to her, as the wife of the most “honourable one,” to look into the shrine from a room above the gateway. The High Priest removes his sandals, we our shoes, and over the rounded, water-washed, grey pebbles, hot as burning plough-shares, we enter the holy court.

A long, low wooden building is the temple, primæval in its form, the broad ends of its roof-tree sticking up like pointed anchors through the roof. Six feet around it on every side the pebbles stop, and the space is filled with the whitest, smoothest sand. All those who go up to the god leave the mark of their feet behind.

Within the temple there is nothing; bare space, dim, obscure; but the High Priest, reverently kneeling on the matting, creates the god. And into that narrow empty space the shadow of the Eternal Presence comes.

Slowly the splash of the breaking waves drifts into the stillness, faint as the whisper of God in the heart of man, a still, small voice. Over the temple there is peace, the peace of two thousand years, unbroken, sacred. And the dreamy ripple grows a sound in the silence. Faint, faint, faint, is it the song of the limitless sea, the voice of the peace and the stillness, or a broken murmur of the beyond that the listening pilgrim hears? Half a memory, half a dream, it dies at the gate of the shrine, where the stir of the world grows loud; yet the soul has heard, has believed.

Out in the sunlit court beyond the “jewelled hedge” the little group of priests still wait. And as we come slowly over the hot round stones, our shoes once more upon our feet, they greet us with an added respect. Even the “honourable interior,” whose sacredness is but indirect, transmitted through a space of court and two open shōji, has become a personage.

The old, old priest, with the face of a Chinese sage, goes on in front. We cross the second court obliquely over the stone-grey pebbles, each rounded with the rubbing of running water, and enter another building, the treasure-house of the temple. Here in a shaded upper chamber, where the white sunlight filters through the yellow matting, a long low shelf runs round, and on it lie the temple’s treasures—relics of dead heroes and of living legend. One by one the High Priest points them out, and in the thin frail voice of age tells their story: A biwa, a sword, some pieces of tattered brocade, the old, old relics of Old Japan. The tales are long, as the old man tells them with the slow-moving utterance of one who has had eighty years in which to speak. But there is a personal vibration in his voice that brings back the long two thousand years of service that he and his have given to the temple, recalls the eighty-two High Priests, his fathers, who join the living man before us to the god Susa-no-wo, from whom the Great Master, Onamuji himself, descended.

All this time, the authoritative young priest has been respectfully but quite obviously waiting to show us something. At last he draws us across the room to where a life-sized plaster statue stands, the Sun-Goddess herself in the flowing robes of Old Japan, a figure full of majesty and power, with round her neck a string of those prehistoric jewels of which the Kojiki is full, comma-shaped polished jewels of jade and crystal, threaded on a scarlet string. And in the loose sleeves of the plaster figure and about the folds at the neck are touches of brightest red. A modern plaster statue of a figure old to unbelief.

And the young man tells the story. He is so eager, so proud to relate what has indeed become the great central fact of the story, that who or what the statue is, or how or why it came there we never hear; but—it had gained a prize at the Chicago Exhibition!

And all the rest of the clergy intone a little chorus of triumph and delight. Even the High Priest himself seems pleased, and a faint smile passes over his face as he bids us examine the ticket.

It is quite true. From the out-stretched wrist of the Sun-Goddess hangs a much-worn ticket, stating in printed Roman capitals that “This Exhibit has won a Prize at the World’s Fair of Chicago.” And the figure stands there, in the long low treasure-house of Izumo’s Great Temple, while the white sunlight, filtering through the yellow matting, falls on the white-robed priests who serve a temple worshipped through two thousand years, falls on the old High Priest with the mystic sacred face, whose fathers stretch back into the mists of Time, and falling, trembles on the faded ticket on the arm of the Sun-Goddess:

World’s Fair, Chicago. This is to certify——

“If the august sage will honourably please to descend.”

And we descended.

In the hot still court the High Priest takes his leave, with long polite phrases of strictest ceremony. The authoritative young priest who escorts us back through the ita-gaki into the outer court is equally ceremonious, and our polite Japanese is heavily taxed to keep up with him. At the outer court he bids us sayonara, and our landlord and our kurumaya, who have been respectfully waiting, form into procession again. We have become great personages in their eyes, very great personages indeed; and the pilgrims, kneeling before the shrine in the outer court, look at us with reverence. We have entered the Holy of Holies, we have visited the god Onamuji in his shrine.

It is with the lowest of bows that our landlord leads us out of the side of the temple court, westward, to where the tall dark trees of the mountain have grown down into the plain. Here, set in the silence of the cryptomerias at the foot of the everlasting hills, is the home of the High Priest. So still, so ordered, so spotless, the house and garden lie like a snowdrop in a forest. And the sound of the sea drifts in as we stand.

Then for the last time we cross the courtyard where the pilgrims are praying in the sunshine, and the temple dancing girls, dim figures in the distance, glide round and round in the long slow circles of the sacred kagura. Court and temple are burning in the sunlight. Beyond the “hedge” and the “jewelled hedge” the great beam-ends of the roof-tree rise out through the temple’s thatch. Within the shrine hangs the mirror of the great Sun-Goddess. For the heart of man, says the Shintō faith, is good and pure. And even as this mirror, when undimmed, reflects the sun, so in the tranquil soul God’s self is imaged.

Over temple and courtyard there is peace; the peace of long centuries dead; the peace of enduring belief. Down from the mists of the past the teaching comes: “Know thyself; in the stillness of peace, know but thyself, and thou shalt see God.”

IV KIZUKI’S BAY

The Sea of Japan, as it wandered down the western coast, took a sudden and unexpected bite out of the land of Izumo; and that bite is the bay of Kizuki. It is the tiniest of bays, with but half a mile of sandy shore between the two steep lines of hills that run straight out to sea: green hills that stretch so far, the green has time to grow a misty blue before they curve toward the water in a deep blurred line. Landwards a length of sandy dune shuts out the village street; and the little bay, set between the hills, and cut off from the sea, lies like an ebbing lake.

On the sandy shore it is still and cool; and from the dozens of Japanese families comes only the high pitched laughter of the playing children. Kizuki is the Margate of the West, and the pilgrims who journey to its shrine stay to breathe its sea air, and combine a religious pilgrimage with a summer holiday in a manner so usual in Japan.

The big hotel under the great north wall of green, with its ground floor, and, wonder of wonders, two, yes—two storeys, is full. So full that the landlord was forced to tuck away his distinguished guests in a back room of the old inn up the village street. The square two-storied house, with all its shōji pushed back and the contents and occupants of every room exposed to public view, looks for all the world like a big doll’s house with the door gone. And its inhabitants eat, drink, play, laugh, sing with the natural unconcern which we could only reach secure behind brick walls, curtained windows, and venetian blinds. The unconcern is so simple, so unaffected, that the Yokohama foreigner, feeling dimly that his own behaviour could never be so natural under such conditions, suspects “play acting,” and will sometimes speak of a “nation of mountebanks” with the scorn of a man among monkeys.

The hotel is built just where the blue beyond of the Western Sea, glowing between the headlands, draws eye and mind away, adding the unbroken curve of Infinity to the quiet lake’s rounded life.

The sun has set; perhaps behind that great green wall he still drops swiftly to the horizon, but in Kizuki there is twilight, a luminous grey twilight that has no shadows, which, spreading, blots all colour from the world. Between wall and wall of hill the sky stretches clear and green. The bay is flooded with a golden light. And there, a black line from gold to green, its base in the yellow water, its crest on the sunset sky, stands Kizuki’s second wonder, the third beauty of Izumo—a tall pointed rock. For the Japanese, who seek much more for line than colour in their beauty, glory in its curves; and the little bay of Kizuki owes its visitors not to the purity of its air, its fishing, boating, bathing, or casino, but to the beauty of its solitary rock and the nearness of its sacred temple.

From shore to sky the luminous grey twilight climbs. The flood of golden light is dead. The great green walls that make the bay are dark. Only in the sky the faintest stain of colour lingers; and there the rock’s lone crest blots a black line upon the dying green.

My kurumaya, in his long parson’s coat and waistcoat, blanched the purest white, asks if I have ever seen a bay more beautiful. And all the dozens of Japanese families stand looking out to sea, for the cult of the stone is in their hearts.

Slowly the luminous twilight draws the world in Chinese ink. It climbs the sky, and the colour dies; only the sombre lines of rock are left.

The little bay is grown a mystic kakemono.

V IN MATSUÉ

We had journeyed in trains and in steamers, in big boats and in little boats, in kuruma and sampan, and had reached the Land of the Gods—and the inn at Matsué.

Not the least of our difficulties had been to find that inn, for our landlord at Kyoto, on hearing we were bound for Matsué, had offered to make all arrangements for us through a “friend in the Prefecture.” And the arrangements had been made, but when we asked for explanations, the address of the friend or the name of our inn, he only smiled, a polite unexplanatory smile, spread out his hands with ceremony, and bowed. All was “yoroshī.”

With this much information we had started, with this much and no more we had arrived. The baby steamer ran alongside the wharf at Matsué, her first-class passengers wriggled out of her cabin, her deck passengers crawled from under the awning; and we sat still, our luggage piled around us, wondering if, like the Peri at the Gates of Paradise, the Land of the Gods would admit us or not.

Just then, when the pause had become really embarrassing, a white-uniformed policeman boarded the steamer; with much ceremony he announced—under the circumstances he could hardly have inquired—that we were the Ijin San from Kyoto. We assented, and he promptly led us outside, where a tall, loose-jointed Japanese, with a Red Indian face hatcheted out of iron wood and wearing “foreign” clothes, stood waiting. The white-uniformed policeman politely performed the ceremony of introduction, and stood aside. This was the friend from the Prefecture; and once we had thoroughly and properly and ceremoniously replied to this fact, which took time, our friend from the Prefecture, who had the smile and the teeth, and the difficulty in concealing them, of the famous Mr. Carker (only he was amiable), introduced our landlord, a little, bright, black squirrel of a man grasping an immense umbrella. More ceremony of course, while the crowd gathered round and the policeman patrolled the group. We were personages. One gesture from the amiable Carker of Matsué Prefecture and five kurumaya burst through the crowd, while twice as many assistants rushed off to bring out our luggage under the eagle eye of the policeman; and with his personal assurances as to our safety and comfort in Matsué, we and our luggage were packed into three kuruma, the amiable Carker and the black squirrel of a landlord climbed into two more, and the procession started. The policeman saluted; the crowd, at the most respectful distance, silently stared; Matsué received her visitors as the most distinguished of strangers.

The kurumaya, uplifted with pride, tore along at the top of their speed in the exact centre of the road, and the traffic scattered before us. We did not run, we flew, over the stone bridge built just where the canal ends and the lagoon begins, up the long, long street parallel to the lagoon, then a dive to the left over a canal bridge, a dash through a green turning, another dive, another bridge over another canal, and with the most imposing clatter we tore into a gravel court in front of the inn, and pulled up short in the recess of the entrance. In an instant the shōji slipped aside and three women in dark blue kimono were bowing, knees and forehead, on the polished wood. We had reached the inn at Matsué.

The three figures got up, as we left our shoes on the long thick block of rough-hewn granite which forms the front door-step between the gravel and the house, and led us in a long procession to an open matted space in the garden. This was our room. It had but half a wall, where the tokonoma stood; the other half was open shōji, leading to the house, and two square pillars at the corners supported the roof. Here we all subsided upon the kneeling-cushions in the strictest order of precedence, based on nearness to the tokonoma. Our black squirrel of a landlord and the amiable Carker of the Prefecture, who had also arrived, sat on their heels with great ceremony, though the “foreign” clothes of our friend from the Prefecture got sadly in his way, and then the interchange of polite phrases began. It was exhaustive, for they were, oh! so ceremonious, and although two little girls with goggle eyes fanned us vigorously, and the blue waters of the lagoon filled what should have been wall in front of us, we grew hotter and hotter.

Then the plain daughter of our comely landlady brought in an immense white meat-dish of railway-buffet thickness, and set it down with conscious pride before her mother. It contained piles of chipped ice, which the comely landlady shovelled into miniature tumblers, the size of dolls’ tooth-glasses, with an imposing iron ladle. She sifted over it white sugar from a pie-dish, and the plain daughter presented it to the company. The drink of the Gods themselves was never more divine! Though like Sam Weller’s orthography, which “varied according to the taste and fancy of the speller,” you can eat this drink or you can drink it. Either way is inelegant, but both are delicious.

It was only by relays of this amphibious refreshment, which went on as long as there was anything besides a large pool of water in the meat-dish, that the polite phrases flowed, on our part at least. At last etiquette, even Japanese etiquette, was satisfied, and our amiable friend from the Prefecture bowed himself away.

The plain daughter removed the meat-dish, not resisting to tell us it was “foreign” as she did so, and retired. And we lay out to cool upon the matting.

The lagoon, the garden and a green courtyard filled the three sides of the room where walls might have been. Even the shōji here had been removed, for there were no houses visible; a high green hedge of thick bamboo bounded court and garden, beyond were the pale blue hills.

It was not a room, it was a nest, we lived as freely in the open air as the birds or the flowers; a brown roof hung like a sheltering leaf above our heads, a cool clean matting covered the ground beneath our feet, but the rustle of leaves and of rice-fields, the restless hum of insect life, the rippling rhythm of the wide lagoon, the whole stir of a growing world was ours. We did not peep at it through a window, we lay in it, we were it; and it rippled and hummed and grew part of us, for Pan is not dead, in the Land of the Gods he is living still.

Then the comely landlady called us to our bath; “the honourable hot water was ready,” and the plain daughter assisted us out of our clothes into our kimono with an attention which, to our sophisticated code, was embarrassing, and led us down a passage whose wooden wall opened into the bathroom. Here our landlady received us. She was just sliding down the wooden plank, which shut off the pipe filled with glowing charcoal from the rest of the bath-tub, and looking up she said the bath was “yoroshī.”

The water was positively bubbling, at that delicious temperature of 110 degrees which the Japanese love; but we were not yet used to literal boiling, so we demanded cold water. And the two little girls with goggle eyes ran away to fetch it in high wooden pails with stiff wooden handles. They ran out by the wooden shōji on the opposite side, which opened straight on to the gravel courtyard of the entrance, and their dark-blue kimono were tucked up into their obi, showing the bright red kimono underneath. And they were laughing.

When we demanded still more cold water they laughed again. The Ijin San had strange ideas of baths evidently. At last, in deference to their feelings, we desisted. The water was no longer bubbling, so we pronounced it “yoroshī,” and they all retired.

The bathroom had a grey stone floor and walls of wooden shōji; at one end stood the high barrel-bath, and wooden buckets, pails and dippers lay all around. A three-foot-high platform ran all down one side and adjoined the passage-way by which we had entered; from it one stepped into the bath, on it one washed and dried oneself. A bath in Japan, which is used by all the family or hotel in succession, is not intended for washing—that is done outside. The two shōji walls, just sliding panels of wood, opened, one on to the passage-way, the other into the front court, and had no fastenings. The Japanese have attained to that sense of modesty which we still feel immodest. They say to bathe is necessary; you cannot take a bath with your clothes on; a necessary action is never immodest, neither has it any prurient attractions for healthy minds. But a Japanese cannot see the low-necked dresses of western women or the pictures of Modern France without a blush. To him a bathing woman is neither modest nor immodest, but simply indifferent; while exposure, merely to attract, is indecency itself. Obscenity exists in grosser minds as in every country in the world; but the people of Japan have a moral simplicity of thought and action that is at one with the conclusions of abstract ethical philosophy.

Like lobsters going to be cooked, we bathed, and got out swiftly but not silently. A yard of cotton towel, where a bank of purple iris grew out of a pale blue stream, was all the towel we had. It would have adequately dried our finger-nails, but the design was comforting if the towel was not. At last, in grey crêpe kimono and straw sandals, clothes as naturally a growth of the climate and the country as its trees or people, we went back to our wall-less room and sat in peace.

The heat of the day was passing, and the colours of the sky and trees deepened before they died. For light in this land of sunshine can hide as well as darkness; it covers the land as a pall, all white and glittering, which blinds as surely as the night. But in that half-hour which comes before the swift descending twilight of the East, all the colours deepen and intensify; they take a strange opaque lustre which makes the thinnest leaf look solid. Mere colour seems thick, almost as though distinct from what it colours and the colours deepen, deepen, till, emerging from a glittering pall of white, they sink beneath the grey-black pall of night. It is the intensest hour of all the day. The world is not working as at the dawn, nor sleeping as in the heat, but strong with the beating pulse of Life that fills even the stillness.

So we sat and watched the deepening glowing earth glow and deepen, and heard the throb of life grow ever louder, till from the streets came up the sound of children’s laughter, and from the town the stir of men.

Rich in richest colours lay the world, with greens and blues of polished jewellery. And then the hurrying twilight settled like the swooping pinions of a bird. The colours lost themselves in grey, the forms they coloured in a broad, still sweep of darkness. On the white bridge, set between canal and lake, the lanterns were already glowing, and the indistinct brown lines of roof melted from the light into the darkness.

For a little while the curved earth-bridge of our miniature garden, the pebbled pathway that in a fragment of a circle led across the winding pond, traced a clear black line against the open sky. Then the children’s laughter in the street grew silent, the stir of men and women stilled.

Slowly, among their shadows, the houses each hung out a light and disappeared. The purple darkness grew with each moment deeper and more black.

Then in a flash the shadows and the lights themselves went out, for our inn had lit her lamps.

Then they brought us dinner on black lacquered trays: pink soup and many kinds of fish, and rice with pickled cucumbers, white and brown and purple. And we did eat. And all the time our landlady and her plain daughter, kneeling on the matting, filled up our rice-bowls from the wooden rice-box, or our tea-bowls from the china teapot, and the bronze kettle which filled that teapot itself needed filling many times, for we were thirsty. And the landlady and her daughter sat placidly on their heels, watching our many social crimes, for there is an etiquette of chopsticks, as strict or stricter than ours of knives and forks, and in equivalent terms we probably were eating with our knives, putting our dirty spoons upon the tablecloth and exhibiting the general manners of the stable.

As a sign that you have finished in Japan you eat your last bowl of rice flavoured with a bowlful of tea. Hardly had we reached this stage when the bright black squirrel of a landlord arrived to announce a visitor, and “Might he come in?”

Considerably surprised we said “Yes,” and who should enter but our amiable Japanese Carker, this time in his own clothes. From an insignificant and somewhat common individual he had, by the mere change from a misfitting yellow suit into a grey silk kimono with striped silk hakama, changed from an underbred clerk into a courtly gentlemen. His manners, always the same, were now at ease with himself, and no longer incongruous or even somewhat ridiculous, they became the perfection of grace and breeding. It is a change that one may often see in Japan.

Again we all sat on our heels on the kneeling-cushions in the strictest order of precedence, and exchanged the politest phrases of ceremony in the courtliest of Japanese. We heard all about the great Temple of Kizuki, the pride of Izumo, and we told of our journeys in the Far East, to Korea and Siberia; and the landlord’s son, who had come in behind the visitor, “half expected he might go there some day with the army,” a wish which may well since have been fulfilled.

In true Japanese fashion our guest had brought us presents, photographs of Matsué and of Izumo’s Great temple. We could only present him in exchange with our cards, a map of the world with the British possessions marked very red, and an old copy of a railway novel. The gifts pleased him, and the whole family examined the map with great interest. They wanted to hear all about England, and the fact that cows and sheep (which they have never seen) walked over our fields, and that it was sometimes light at nine in the evening struck on their imagination. They asked many questions about the sheep, and “what the light looked like?” which was difficult of explanation.

In spite of more amphibious drinks from the white meat-dish, which seemed served here (probably as a concession to our foreign tastes) instead of the inevitable tea to visitors, the struggle after faultless politesse, the intricacies of a ceremonious Japanese made us grow all limp with heat again. And when we had bowed our last bow, uttered our last “Mata o-me ni kakarimashō” (“Another time may my eyes honourably behold you”), we were reduced to a really pitiable state of exhaustion. Our comely landlady, who had a large brain and a seeing eye, did not wait to question. She cleared the room, sent the two giggling girls with the goggle eyes to hang the green mosquito net, like an imposing martial tent, from the four corners of the room, while the plain daughter brought futon like thin eiderdown quilts to sleep upon, undressed us carefully and retired, bidding us “honourably resting deign” as she did so.

As the lamp went out the ample folds of the square tent stood out like a royal pavilion. We crept beneath and lay down upon the matted sheets which covered the futon. In deference to our foreign bones we had several futon underneath us, and one rolled up beneath our heads; but for all that the hardness of the matted floor, stuffed though it was, rose up and hit us before the night was out.

We slept beneath our transparent tent, in our wall-less room, as the flowers sleep, part of the living night. All the little sounds of leaf and lake stirred round us undisturbed; the rice-ears rustled in the silent night; the great trees stretched their branches as they slept. Dreaming, the waters of the salt lagoon moved towards the sea, and all the wealth of insect life, turning in its sleep, called faintly. The still small voice of the sky whispered softly in the breezes, and the great green Earth reached up to listen through her dreams. Bound in the chains of man, it is at night-time that she stirs so restless, when all the humming, conscious life is laid to sleep, when men and insects slumber. Then the green Earth wakes; but she has endured so long that even in her waking she is half asleep. Bound down with streets and houses, she never wakes at all. And so all night we listened to the voices of the world. At the dawning, when all Nature stands hushed before the coming of the sun, we slept. But the dawning in this southern land is short and swift. With no clouds to dim his strength, the sun soon sat flaming on his wide blue throne; and all the insects of the tropics, warmed into life, rose up to buzz and hum. And we awoke.

In the Land of the Gods there are no clocks, and although one in the main street of Matsué proclaimed its “foreign” time, the inhabitants beneath go their own way, and the baby steamers arrive and depart in open disregard of the hours upon the dial. So some time between the dawning and the noon we woke. The house was getting up. All the little sounds of rising men and women, of a day’s beginning, were about us, so we got up too. Crawling from under our vast green tent, we went down the polished passage-way to the inner courtyard, where in a cool green cloister all the rooms of the inn looked out. A long stone font filled with water, a hanging wooden dipper, a row of shallow brass pans on a wooden shelf stood waiting. Here the whole inn washes. With water from the font, cool and fresh from its night’s sleep in the grey stone basin, you fill the bamboo dipper and pour out into the shallow pans; and then, standing in the passage-way, with all the rooms around you, you wash. And unless a nēsan, attracted by the whiteness of your skin, should stop a moment to look and wonder, no one is interested. The usual lengths of cotton towelling hung beside the dipper, like banners on their poles; and a crevice of sunshine piercing into the green courtyard quivered on the round brass pans.

Tent and futon had vanished when we returned, and the two little goggle-eyed girls, still with their blue kimono tucked up to show the red ones underneath, were sweeping the matting with bamboo brooms. We dressed in corners unattended, and sat down to wait.

From the sounds of passing feet, and the directing words of our comely landlady, it seemed that great things were preparing for us—quite what remained a mystery. At last the plain daughter, bubbling with the pleasure of our surprise, came to call us.

“As for the morning meal,” she said, “all is prepared,” and even the ceremony of her bows suffered from her eagerness.

We went through the half-wall of shōji panels, across a room, into another, where the family, all assembled, almost (had it not been entirely un-Japanese) clapped its hands in pride.

There on the matting, and each leg protected by a supporting slab of wood, stood a foreign table; four foreign chairs, their legs too nailed into long slats of wood, stood round. Across a corner of the table lay a thin strip of cotton cloth, and on this, in all the majesty of its solid ugliness, reposed the white meat-dish of our god-like drink. This morning it was full of something smoking, dimly resembling Irish stew.

The comely landlady beamed as we approached.

“Sea-food forthcomes,” she said proudly.

And to our “foreign” breakfast we sat slowly down. How bad it was! But the family, even to the old, old grandmother, were so delighted, so proud of their unexpected triumph, that we ate that abominable stew till not a fragment of its tough meat or a spoonful of its gluey gravy remained.

Many times since have I wondered how that Napoleonic landlady organised the feast? How did she get the meat? Who cooked it? and where did they learn? Did she invent the recipe out of her own head? Perhaps she raided the garrison? She was capable of it. There was bread too. Matsué was quite in the front of the fashion; not like poor Kizuki, which was sadly out of date; they hadn’t even bīru (beer) there.

All this she told us as she helped us, always with the iron ladle, to that terrific stew. With the foreign food too, we had “foreign” china, horrible railway-restaurant plates and cups, clumsy and thick, sprawled all over with a large design in bilious blue; knives and forks that never matched, and, of course, the inevitable cruet. This hideous article is always the first vestige of “foreign” fashion in a Japanese hotel, where it accompanies every meal. Once it may have been of German silver; it is all drab now. Long centuries of use have left it bent and dinted. Its bottles leak, their stoppers never fit, and whatever they once held, all now drip oil and taste soy. We thought of our dainty lacquered trays, our delicate white china with drawings in faint blue, the refinement and the art of that meal, and we sighed. The fish they could not spoil, and their tea is always good, so we breakfasted. And the plain daughter, whose ambitions (or her mother’s) soared to Tokyo heights of fashion, asked if everything was really “yoroshī” upon the table, and, if not, “would we show her how?” The knives and forks had puzzled her woefully; how ought they to be laid? So we laid the table, and we set the forks, and we placed the bread, and we handed plates and glasses, and the ancient grandmother shook with astonishment. Was ever like seen under the sun? And even the capable landlady exclaimed. So the conscientious plain daughter worked through her knives and forks, her bread on this side and her glasses on that, with the zeal of an earnest student; and afterwards we caught her displaying her great accomplishment to a circle of admiring friends.

We were to see the sights of Matsué. Our friend from the Prefecture and the black squirrel of a landlord had talked it over exhaustively the night before. We were catered for like Royal visitors. We did not need to plan, or ask, or seek. “Honourably trouble not. It happens.” And it did.

That morning the landlord, in a long polite speech, made us over to his son, a quiet clever lad who might have been the twin of his plain sister; and we set off. We wished to stop for many things, temples and toy shops, the peeps of life on street and wharf, but our guide, though never contradicting, was so preoccupied, so intent on something that we gave in and meekly followed down the long streets over the many canals, whose bridges showed an arch like the young crescent of the moon, along the hot white road, until we reached an ugly wooden building in the style called “foreign,” all decorated with flags and policemen. Here we entered. The policemen drew up in line as we passed, and the scurrying feet of a dozen officials all clothed in long frock-coats came down the vestibule.

It was an Exhibition of the Arts, Industries, and Manufactures of the Province of Izumo, and quite inadvertently we had arrived to open the proceedings. The distinguished strangers from England, received by the phalanx of frock-coats, were conducted majestically through the whole building. We were not allowed to miss a single room. If, after peeping into one, and finding it contained nothing but sacks of rice, or samples of raw silk, we retreated, instantly a frock-coat or a policeman appeared to lead us round. We did not miss the least little exhibit of the least little room. We saw them all: bags of rice, cocoons of silk, hollow candles with growing designs in faint pale colours, Izumo crystals famed throughout Japan, lengths of piece-silk, twists of sewing-silk, embroideries, china, the famous yellow china of Matsué, all the roots and grains and wood of the province, fishing nets and field tools, and a whole large section of the beautiful Izumo matting. In our admiration we wished to buy, and instantly all the frock-coats ran after one another, each official going to consult his chief. They arrived in groups and talked; they went away and came back again. We had unknowingly placed the whole officialdom of Matsué on the horns of a dilemma. We were the distinguished visitors from England; we wished to buy Matsué’s most especial production; the honour was great—but the regulations said no exhibit might be taken away before the close of the exhibition; and the Japanese respect the law as they respect the Emperor. So we waited. At last a most wonderful frock-coat appeared resplendent with decorations; solemnly he made a speech explaining the difficulty, excusing the delay, expressing great honour at our request, and at a sign his attendant handed over the matting to our attendant, and with many bows we parted.

That afternoon, as we lay upon our matting in our wall-less room, fanned by the plain daughter, our landlady brought in the local newspaper, and sitting down on her heels she read to us a long account of the arrival in Matsué of the “distinguished strangers from England,” and a kind of “Stop Press telegram” announcing their gracious purchase of matting at the exhibition that morning, besides an editorial advertisement of a description of their visit to the exhibition for the next issue. Our rooms at the inn were described at length, our appearance “with faces white as milk”—the foreign simile showing great learning on the part of the reporter—our ages politely overstated, for the young here, women as well as men, desire to be old so that to be thought older than one’s age is the greatest of compliments; the paper therefore called us most politely “upwards of forty,” causing our dear landlady to beam with delight, and the plain daughter to utter a long series of those curious strangled “h’s” by which the Japanese express intense admiration, as she fanned us more vigorously. Then, à propos of our “milk-white faces,” the landlady, with much hesitation, asked a favour “so great that to speak unable am.” Might she have our soap? Japanese soap they had, but somehow, possibly, that “foreign” soap of ours might account for some of our strange whiteness. So she and the plain daughter retired with the soap; and for the rest of the afternoon they scrubbed diligently in the bathroom.

And we sat quiet upon our matting in the heat, while the green hills and the rice-fields, the pebbled pathway of our garden bridge, and all the wide still spaces of the lake hung as frescoes round our room. The hot blue sky burned fiercely, the blue of a heated brick-kiln, and our living frescoes hung motionless as the work of man. There was neither change nor shadow. Hills and lake and rice-fields lay still against the sky—flat as it were upon a flattened background, and in that light which did not shine but suffused itself through all things, there were no shadows, a deepened blueness here and there, but neither shadow nor perspective. The sense of distance, as the sense of shade, was quite annihilated. Those old Japanese artists saw truly, despite our western dictums, light does not lie here as we see it, still less as it lies in the actual tropics; it has effects of light and distance which are all its own, and the Japanese, seeing them, reproduced them, not because there are no others, but because these are so truly Japanese. And we, knowing neither the country nor the climate, but strong in our arrogance of “laws,” called it “false, a childlike art ignorant of science.”

In the Land of the Gods we sat and learnt wisdom, and Japan and its people, its life and its pictures took a new meaning in our eyes, and the false became true.

When our landlady and her daughter came back from the bathroom they brought a small thin oblong of soap, and their hands were all wrinkled with washing.

“Mada kurō gozaimas kara omachi nassatta hō ga yō gozaimas,” they said in a melancholy, half-laughing voice. “Still brown because, leaving off had best be done,” and they held out their four hands for inspection.

The Ijin San’s whiteness was not in the soap. But when we went we left as a present a whole new cake of “foreign” soap; and their supplementary scrubbings must have been many.

That evening we were entertained by a small boy with the snubbiest of noses, who peeped slyly at us from out of the darkness of the garden. When he was induced to come in he brought all his lesson books, which he turned over for our amusement, and between each page he chuckled, but he never told us why. Whether it was the recollections of his lost lessons or a subtle sense of absurdity that we could not read the Chinese hieroglyphics of his primers we never knew, but his chuckles were deep with joy. Then in the pauses he would count solemnly up to ten, all the English he knew, and chuckle again.

Two wide-eyed little maidens were brought in next morning to see the Ijin San. In a very awestruck whisper they inquired “if we were real.”

These little babies were very solemn and very good, but not one scrap shy or frightened. In all their little lives they had never met a grown-up being who was harsh to them. Though obedience is the first requisite of Japanese children young or old, they give it as the plants their flowers, not from a sense of hard-learned duty, but as a natural product of an eternal law.

The babies made the funniest little bows as they touched their little foreheads to the ground. And then they sat and looked at us with wide, wide-opened eyes. To them we belonged to the world of the mythical Kirin, and the terrible Kitsuné who takes bad babies away and feeds them on frogs and snails; we belonged to the realm of the sea-goddess who married Urashima, to the land of the fairies. So they asked if we were real.

They could not be induced to talk to us, though they were wonderfully polite, and quite knocked their little foreheads on the floor when they said “Good-bye.” Did we figure as goblins or as fairies in their dreams, I wonder?

That afternoon a stall-owner from the exhibition came to show us Izumo crystals.

For two hours he knelt upon the matting opening the beautifully made boxes of white unpainted wood. And we looked at large divining-crystals without fleck or flaw, at the pale clouded crystals shading from mist-white to palest crimson, at the agates and amethysts; and all the time our comely landlady and her plain daughter sat on their heels and admired with taste and great discrimination.

There was not in all this shopful of precious stones anything to wear. A few crystal hairpins, a few “foreign” studs, but no jewellery as we understand it. The Japanese never wear jewellery; neither rings, nor bracelets, nor chains, nor pins, nor brooches, nor tiaras—nothing. One wonders how much crime and heart-burning has the nation missed. Precious stones they have, but they buy and keep them for their shape or for their colour, as a picture or a bronze, not to adorn themselves. All the rest of the world, in all times, barbarous and civilised, have fought and stolen, slain and ruined themselves just to heap upon their fingers or their heads strings of gleaming stones. In this island-empire alone men and women have looked at precious stones, have handled and admired, but never worn them. One wonders was it purely the artistic instinct of the race which kept them from it, or the stern morality of the samurai, preaching denial and self-control.

And again one wonders if too much jewellery be barbaric, where in the scale of civilisation does a nation come that wears none at all? Surely art can produce worthier things than jewellery, and are not morals better without it?

Our inn was full of guests, quite full, and all the rooms have paper panels. There are no keys, no locks, no bolts, the whole inn, were it so minded, could go in and out of every room; and yet we all sleep in peace and quite secure. It is true that an innkeeper here must bear an unblemished character or his house is shut, and that the guests often come with a letter from their last innkeeper, but not always, and yet we all sleep with half an inch of rice-paper between us, and walls of sliding panels. Could a hotelful of civilised Europeans be so trusted? If not to steal, then not to pry as well? But here nobody looks. Although we have become great personages indeed, nobody looks. And in the big towns as in the country villages, in railway hotels as in this remote corner of the Land of the Gods, we have slept in absolute security in rooms that are always open. Only once in all our wanderings did someone push the shōji. It was an Ijin San who thought it was “a lark.”

And so we lived in the Land of the Gods and learnt wisdom, wisdom from the lake, and the hills, and the rice-fields, from the night and the daylight, and the inner beauty of the land lay before our eyes, still dim, for western eyes are blind to eastern meaning through want of power to focus, but in part we saw, and the joy of that seeing has never passed away. The town, the inn, the comely landlady, and the wee, wide-eyed children all taught us wisdom and the meaning and the beauty of the land. Slowly we saw, dimly too, for western eyes are very blind to eastern meaning, and race, religion, training and the whole up-make of our ideas and beliefs stand so often in the way. Still in part we saw, and the lessons of that seeing have never passed away. We had come in all humility, so the Gods were kind. They opened our eyes that we might see.

When we announced that we were going the household was upset. And on the last morning of our stay they all, landlord, landlady, plain daughter, goggle-eyed waiting-girls, came in a procession bearing gifts. We had fans to keep us cool upon the journey, white towels with pictures of the inn in blue, and above all, gifts of the beautiful Matsué china which we had so much admired. Everything was tied up in the neatest parcels wrapped in pieces of brocade, and presented on lacquered trays. On the top of the Matsué china lay a tiny white paper cone lined with red in which was stuck a splinter of bamboo cane, the modern symbol of the old-time fish which was always presented with each gift. And the meaning of the whole is peace, plenty, and prosperity. We had nothing so beautiful to give in exchange, only a cake of foreign soap and a visiting-card. The cake of soap was considered by the rest of the household, including the old grandmother, who had come in, as a palpable hit, and the visiting-cards were much prized.

Then with every one carrying our luggage we were escorted to the gravel recess of the entrance, where our kurumaya stood waiting, and all the household went down on its knees on the polished wooden platform and said sweet sayonara.

And there in the walled-in recess with the wooden gheta lying on the big grey block of stone the kneeling figures stayed. Clad in their dark blue kimono with the bright-coloured obi at the waist, they knelt on the polished wood, their heads on their hands, their hands on the floor; and as they knelt the rolls and whorls of their coiffures seemed to grow like flowers from bending stalks of blue.

“Sayonara,” they said, and all the blue stalks swayed.

“Sayonara,” we called back. “Farewell.” Oh, dear Land of the Gods that has taught us wisdom, not you, but we have need to fare well.

VI THE TWO SPIRITS

Out of the town and above it, the daimyō of Matsué once built him a castle, and he filled it with the stern warriors whose soul was their sword. Daimyō after daimyō lived and died, and still a daimyō ruled over Izumo; and warrior after warrior fought and was slain, and still the samurai learned the laws of the bushi, the way of the warrior, and the strong fortress of Matsué, with its moat and its walls, was guarded and kept by men whose lives were one long servitude to honour and duty. The grim ideals of a code which feared no death and no torture, which exacted the sternest courage and self-control, were taught and practised in the castle of Matsué, until the Son of Heaven ruled in Tokyo and daimyō and samurai were feudal lord and loyal vassal no longer.

The grim walls are standing now, the castle with its moat still rises above Matsué to possess it, but the spirit of its fierce dominance is gone; instead, that twin-soul of the Japanese race has entered into the stronghold, the Love of Beauty has cast out the Love of Battle, the sword is changed to flowers, for in the moat of the castle the lotus is blooming.

Stern and very strong the grey walls rise high into the air, they have not lost their grimness though their feet are bathed in flowers. It is true the gateway is broken, and where the drawbridge once fell there is now a broad path of stamped earth, but the long lines of solid wall are firm still and uninjured. They still rise frowning from out the deep waters of the moat; but to-day the moat itself has disappeared, in its place the broad thick leaves of the lotus stretch like a silvery green river around the walls. So broad, so strong, so helpless, the great leaves hang like unsteady giants on their stalks, and the pin-points of water gather and gather on the hairy surface, till the leaf curls to a cup and a big waterdrop, molten as quicksilver, runs gleaming over the green.

The lotus leaves lie all lazy at angles of rest, but the flowers seem to rise on their stalks as birds taking wing. All pure white or palest pink, each single flower is a giant’s handful of blossom, and yet the petals are delicate, almost transparent; thin, too, in their texture, but of a satiny softness, they curl with the grace of a rose above the pure gold of their hearts.

The lotus leaves dream inert, each on its stalk hangs drooping, often awry: they encircle the walls like a green river of water that stagnantly sleeps; but the flowers are awake and they rise from their leaves as the Spirit of Beauty once rose from the waters. All pure white on this side of the gateway, all pale pink on that, the great cups of blossom stand stately. Very fragile in their texture, and yet so ample in their form the lotus flower seems the meeting-point of luxuriance and grace; the point where more of either were really less of both.

With its roots deep down in the mud, with its leaves often frankly ridiculous in the large uncouthness of their attitudes, with its beauty in no way ethereal, the lotus is yet the symbol of Death, not of Nirvana, but of Death, of the completing of one brief period in this long cycle which we call Life. So in Matsué they planted the moat of the castle with the flower of the lotus for the life of Old Japan, of castle and daimyō and samurai, is ended. It is Death but a new Beginning.

Beyond the gateway, a grass-grown flight of granite steps leads to the castle, and we climb.

All the castles in all Japan are the same, bigger or smaller, with details of decoration or style that differentiate them, they are yet in the broad outlines of their architecture one and the same. A Japanese house is Japanese, but the castle comes from China, at least originally, and its pagoda character is very evident. The castle at Matsué had its ground floor of stone, rough-hewn blocks of granite which fitted closely to each other without mortar. The stone storey, as all the succeeding ones of wood above it, tapered gradually inwards so that the topmost wooden storey would have fitted into the one below it, and that into the next, and all into the square stone box of the ground floor, as neatly as the nest of baskets sold in the streets of the town below.

Inside, the rough-hewn stone walls were left as bare as the outside, and a long steep ladder of a staircase, which began abruptly in the middle of one floor to end with equal abruptness in the middle of the floor above, led from storey to storey. The stone storey was divided into two, the rest were of wood, and all now were absolutely bare and unadorned; the mere outer shell of a building which had once lived and sheltered lives. Only in the top floor, where on all four sides sliding panels of glass had replaced the rice-paper shōji, was there any sign of life. This room had been turned into a sort of Military Museum with relics of the China war, swords and guns, and a whole long series of wonderful coloured prints, with the Chinese always fleeing, their long, long pigtails floating in the breeze, the Japanese always pursuing with impossible profiles and highly polished boots; and gravely studying the pictures was a group of schoolboys. Their comments were mostly bloodthirsty; the best way of sticking the pink Chinaman on the left, or of beheading the yellow one on the right; but they did not seem moved with any animosity or any sense of triumph, they merely discussed the sword-cuts scientifically, seriously, as though it were a grave business of life and they wished to arrive at a right conclusion.

Matsué’s castle is beyond and above the town, and the daimyō who built it and the warriors who guarded it looked down on this side over the grey roofs of the houses to the wide blue waters of the still lagoon, on that side over the grey roofs of the houses and the sweep of the quiet rice-fields where the river, like a broad path of steel wanders through the bright green fields; and further round they looked to where the tall trees climb the steep hillsides, and further still to the great blue lines of the hills themselves shutting in the sky. And the old warriors in their watch-tower looked out over this wide fair world which lay so still around them. They guarded the castle and they kept it, and the light that was set in that tower was the light of courage and of duty. Over the world beneath their feet it shone out clear and bright, but the world was wider than their horizon. After many years they learned that lesson, and then they came down from their watch-tower, and the light which once burned there in the castle is gone to-day through all the land.

Then the Spirit of Beauty, the soul of that world which lay so still beneath the tower, went up to the castle, where with courage and duty the love of battle and of death had ruled so long, to possess it. And in the waters of the moat the lotus is blooming.

With its roots in the mud, say the Japanese Buddhists, the lotus flower is an emblem of man, of a good man in this wicked world. From among the sins and the passions of life Buddha himself rose perfect, pure as the lotus, and perfect. So for a sign and a comfort to all men, Lord Buddha himself sits throned on the lotus, showing how Goodness Eternal came, not from good, but from the midst of things evil.

In the moat of the castle the people of Matsué have planted whole fields of the lotus, that the flower which is perfect might grow from the sins of the past, grow with each cycle of Life ever more perfect.