"I'm afraid it might be rather unconventional, would it not?" she hesitated.
"It would be still more unconventional if you went alone. You should have an escort. I shan't disturb you. I promise you that I shall be as dumb and unobtrusive as your walking-stick; but, really, I do wish you would let me come along."
She looked at him reflectively. He wondered what thoughts were forming behind these fine, black eyes; the desire to go with her, which had been only an inspirational whim, took deeper hold. She must let him come. He leaned forward earnestly. She smiled. "Very well, then. I suppose you might as well come; but remember, I shall be at work; I shall want to think, to absorb. You must be as you promised, just inanimate, a block of wood."
He promised hastily, curiously noting in himself a feeling of trembling pleasure. They finished their tea and took the electric train to Omori.
Twilight was falling when they reached the village. They walked through narrow winding lanes, past tall bamboo fences enclosing spacious gardens, came to the open country, rice fields, scattered groups of houses clustered on tree-clad hills. In the gathering shadows crickets were tuning up for their serenades; the moon, rising from behind the pine groves on the Ikegami ridge, bathed the landscape with soft luminosity.
As they climbed the long broad stone stairway leading up to the temple heights, they heard the monotonous euphony of a chant. At a minor shrine close to the entrance a priest was engaged in some ceremonial. As they stood by the stone foxes guarding the entrance to the small court fronting it, they could see his vestmented figure, kneeling, facing the dimly illuminated gorgeousness of gilt, and brocade, and lacquer, a glimpse of resplendent Oriental opulence devoted to mysterious, age-old rites.
They passed on. The rest of the temple grounds lay in darkness, illuminated sparingly by a few faint electric lights, irritatingly modern amidst all the ancient buildings, lofty cryptomerias, crumbling tombs. They passed along the broad stone-paved path, smoothed by wear of feet of generations of worshipers, under the massive, towering crimson gateway leading into the inner court. Here was a plateau on the hilltop, whence ran on all sides corrugations of ridges and valleys, set with hundreds of graves, carved stone monuments, lichened sepulchers, broodingly silent in the shadows of fantastically gnarled pine limbs.
The main temple buildings were closed. The wide court was bathed in moonlight, brilliant, white, setting out in strong relief every detail of contour of curved roof, carved pillars, bronze figures anachronistically finding in their midst a battered rapid-fire gun, trophy from the Russian War. But it was all too brightly visible, too plainly seen; the eeriness, the nebulous awe of obscure mystery, lay beyond, all about them, among the graves in the shadows of the pines.
From the right of the courtyard, near the gateway, a pathway ran, straight as a sword, penetrating into the heart of the pine grove, a chasm of opalescent light, a shimmery gorge of white brilliance in abrupt contrast to the almost solid walls of blackness, leading like a fantastically contrived magic road to a pagoda, which closed it, with intricately carved roof set upon roof, rising with slender elegance towards the dark sapphire heavens. It formed a picture, but strange, eccentrically unusual, without color—pale, shimmery, pearly—set against ebony blackness. It seemed to him that it would be impossible to express it through the ordinary media of the brush; as if it might be worked out only by some odd special process, mother-of-pearl and teak; but even then it would lose the peculiar scintillating brilliance which seemed to make even the blackness luminous.