PICKING TEA
Groups of bobbing hats beside the tea-bushes, carts loaded with sacks and baskets of tea-leaves; trays of toasting tea-leaves within every door-way, a delicate rose-like fragrance in the air; women and children sorting the crop in every village; and this was the tea season in its height. Here were bushes two and three hundred years old yielding every year their certain harvest, and whole hill-sides covered with matted awnings to keep from scorching or toughening in the hot sun those delicate young leaves, which are destined to become the costly and exquisite teas chosen by the sovereign and his richest subjects.
Then we toiled up bush-covered steeps to cross elevated river-beds; rode through towered floodgates of dry watercourses, down to the green plain their lost waters had fed; through village streets, and past many a picturesque tateba, in one of which stood a little yellow Cupid in the sunshine that filtered through a wistaria trellis; and so on through ever-changing country scenes to the famous view of Nara’s temples, trees, and pagodas.
Nara! A mountain-side covered with giant trees bound together by vines and old creepers; an ancient forest seamed with broad avenues, where the sunlight falls in patches and deer lie drowsing in the fern; double and triple lines of moss-covered stone lanterns massing themselves together, their green tops dim in the dense shadow; temples twelve centuries old; the booming of bells, and the music of running water.
Nara! The ancient capital, the cradle of Buddhism, and still the holy place of pilgrimages; its forest paths echoing the jingle of the devotees’ ringed staffs, the mutter of their prayers, and the clink of their copper offerings at the temple gates. A place of stillness and dreams; an Arcadia, where the little children and the fawns play together, and the antlered deer eat from one’s hand, and look up fearlessly with their soft human eyes. Old Shinto temples, where the priestesses dance the sacred measures of Suzume before the Sun Goddess’s cave; temples where Buddha and Kwannon sit in gilded glory on the lotus, and lights, incense, and bells accompany the splendid ceremonies of that faith.
The great antiquity of Nara makes the magnificence of Nikko, with its Shogun’s tombs, seem almost parvenu. It is the good-fortune of the older fane that its distance from the railroad—twenty-six miles—saves it from the rush of progress and the stream of tourists.