The temple as a whole consists not simply of one large room where the image of the goddess is enshrined, but is made up of a number of smaller buildings connected with each other in a cunning and artistic fashion by winding ways that nature seems to have devised in order to add to the attractions of the place. In each of these lesser temples there are placed images of some of the more commonly worshipped idols, a veritable kind of Pantheon where each visitor can find the particular god that he deems the most suitable for his individual requirements. Leading to these various buildings, there are little grottoes, and covered pathways, and natural adjustments of rocks, in which stone seats and granite tables have been arranged, and where the crowds of worshippers, tired with their climb up the mountain path and anxious to get out of the glare of the great sun, can sit and enjoy the refreshing coolness that these recesses in the hillside naturally give.
But let us take our stand a little to the side of the goddess and watch the worshippers as they come in turn and take their position in front of her to offer their petitions to her. The widow with the sorrowful face, whom we saw climbing the hill, without one thought of the glorious scenery that filled the landscape with its beauty, comes in with the shadow deepening on her face, and lifting up her folded hands in the attitude of devotion to the goddess begins to mutter to her the story of the trouble that is weighing on her heart. The sight is truly a most pathetic one. The face is in agony, and the eyes are turned with an intensity of gaze upon the calm face of the wooden image before her. The faith expressed in the impassioned look is profound, for it would seem as though her whole soul was absorbed in the telling of her story and in her wish to touch the heart of the placid image of the goddess.
After a few minutes, anxious to know what the answer of the idol is going to be, she takes up two pieces of bamboo that are lying on the table in front of it, and throws them up in the air. With a clatter they fall on to the tiled floor, and by the way they lie she learns that her prayer has been granted, and that the goddess will give her the desire of her heart. A smile like a flash of sunlight in a winter sky fleets across her pale thin face, and one can see what a sweet one it might be, were her heart relieved of the sorrow that has painted it with such sombre colours.
Her place is taken by another who has been standing by waiting her turn. Evidently her business is not a very pressing one, or such as to cause her much trouble at heart, for after a few seconds of muttering she tosses up with almost an irreverent fling the two divining bits of bamboo, and looks with a casual air at the position they take on the floor. The answer they give is No—her prayer is not granted—so with a bow to the goddess, and a kind of pout upon her lips, she passes out into the open air. Her matter could not have been of any importance whatever, for in a moment she is laughing and gossiping with her friends, as though her visit to the goddess had been a joke that was now ended.
And so one after another come and take their stand before the idol. Some have a free-and-easy air about them, whilst others are intense and impassioned. Some accept at once the answer of the goddess as final, whilst others again continue to fling up the two coarse pieces of bamboo until they give the reply that they wish to have. One young lad about eighteen attracts my attention. For fully a minute, with calm and untroubled face, his lips keep moving and his gaze is concentrated on Kwan-Yin. I ask him when he is finished what he has been asking of her. “I have been out of employment for some time,” he replies, “and I have been round to several temples and entreated the gods there to find me a place; but they have done nothing for me, so I thought I would come here and see if I should be more successful with the idol of this temple.”
As the evening sun began to set behind the mass of clouds that seemed to gather on the Western mountains to catch the last glimpse of him before he disappeared, we began to descend the hill. Numbers of those that I had seen standing with devout faces and uplifted hands before the idol were fellow-travellers. Others, again, who had ascended the hill for an outing, and whom I had watched sitting in the grottoes, eating peanuts, and deftly cracking dried melon seeds, and sipping tea, moved down at the same time. The wooden gods were left behind in the gathering gloom of their shrines, and the only figures they saw were the opium-visaged priests that flitted about like ghosts. The people at any rate had had a pleasant day, and a breath of pure air, and a vision of nature in her most beautiful aspect, but nothing more. “What have you gained to-day in your appeal to the goddess?” I asked of a man that I had seen very devout in his prayers. He looked at me with a quick and searching glance. “You ask me what answer I have got to my petition to the goddess?” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “that is what I want to know from you.” “Well, you have asked me more than I can tell you. The whole question of the idols is a profoundly mysterious one that no one can fathom. Whether they do or can help people is something I cannot tell. I worship them because my fathers did so before me, and if they were satisfied, so must I be. The whole thing is a mystery,” and he passed on with the look of a man who was puzzled with a problem that he could not solve, and that look is a permanent one on the face of the nation to-day.
CHAPTER V
SERVANTS