As they rolled swiftly on, through the wondrous panorama of teeming Tokyo streets, the sun hung, an elongated globe of deep orange-crimson, streaked with little whips of rosy cloud. Beneath it the mountains lay like coiled, purple dragons, indolent and surfeited. One star twinkled palely in the lemon-colored sky. Yet now to Barbara the splendor of color seemed tragic, the poured-out beauty but a veil, behind which moved, old and apish and gray, the familiar passions of the world. Before her eyes were flowing and mingling a thousand strands of orient life, yet she saw only the red light glowing on the stone entrance of Shimbashi, with those hideous saffron jackets filing perpetually into its yawning mouth, like unholy spectres in a dream.
CHAPTER V
THE MAKER OF BUDDHAS
The setting sun poured a flood of wine-colored light over Reinanzaka—the "Hill-of-the-Spirit"—whose long slope rose behind the American Embassy, whither the Dandridge victoria was rolling. It was a long leafy ridge stippled with drab walls of noble Japanese houses, and striped with narrow streets of the humble; one of the many green knolls that, rising above the gray roofs, make the Japanese capital seem an endless succession of teeming village and restful grove.
Along its crest ran a lane bordered with thorn hedges. A little way inside this stood a huge stone torii, facing a square, ornamented gateway, shaded by cryptomerias. The latter was heavily but chastely carved, and on its ceiling was a painting, in green and white on a gold-leaf ground, of Kwan-on, the All-Pitying. From the gate one looked down across the declivity, where in a walled compound, the rambling buildings of the Embassy showed pallidly amid green foliage. Beyond this were sections of trafficking streets, and still farther a narrow, white road climbed a hill toward a military barracks—a blur of dull, terra-cotta red. In the dying afternoon the lane had an air of placid aloofness. Somewhere in a thoroughfare below a trolley bell sounded, an impudent note of haste and change in a symphony of the intransmutable. Over all was the scent of cherry-blossoms and a faint musk-like odor of incense.
From the gate a mossy pavement, shaded by sacred mochi trees, led to a Buddhist temple-front of the Mon-to sect, before which a flock of fluttering gray-and-white pigeons were pecking grains of rice scattered by a priest, who stood on its upper step, watching them through placid, gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore a long green robe, a stole of gold brocade was around his neck, and his face was seamed with the lines of life's receding tides. At one side of the pavement, worn and grooved by centuries of worshiping feet, was a square stone font and on the other side a graceful bell-tower of red lacquer. Back of this stood a forest of tall bronze lanterns, and beyond them a graveyard, an acre thick with standing stone tablets of quaint, squarish shape, chiseled with deep-cut idiographs. Nearer the graveyard, overshadowed by the greater bulk of the temple, was a long, low nunnery, with clumps of flowers about it. Through its bamboo lattices one caught glimpses of women's figures, clad in slate-color, of placid faces and boyishly shaven heads. About the yard a few little children were playing and a mother, with a baby on her back, looked smilingly on.
The space where the priest stood was connected by a small, curved, elevated bridge with another temple structure standing on the right of the yard, evidently used as a private residence. This was more ornate, far older and touched with decay. Its porch was arcaded, set with oval windows and hung with bronze lanterns green from age. Its entrance doors were beautifully carved, paneled with endless designs in dull colors, and bordered with great gold-lacquer peonies laid on a background of green and vermilion. From their corners jutted snarling heads of grotesque lions and on either side stood gigantic Ni-O—glowering demon-guardians of sacred thresholds. Through the straight-boled trees that grew close about it, came transient gleams of a hedged garden, of burnished green and maroon foliage, where cherry-blooms hung like fluffy balls of pink smoke. The garden had a private entrance—a gate in the outer lane—and over this was a small tablet of unpainted wood:
Which, translated, read: