“I won’t believe it,” I said resolutely. “That whatever rules the universe should trust it anywhere to clumsy or wicked interference— No, impossible!”
“Yet we see it daily,” Arima replied calmly. “But things always come right in the long run. This power of which I speak is only one gesture of the Supreme and there is much behind it. Illusions pass like clouds but the sun remains.”
“But—but,” I hesitated.
“It is this which explains the mystery of good and evil, as we call them. Think it out and you will see. Shall we go in now? I have a fancy that the processes of the night—even the river—like to be free of us intruders. If we are not in harmony with them——”
“Arima!” I said on an impulse, “have you this secret? I think—I know that in your hands it would be safe. What you have said makes me long for more. If the Abbot judged me fit for so much—and you say he must have known——”
He stretched his hand in the moonlight and grasped mine in a strong clasp. I had a sensation of something throbbing and beating from his wrist to mine. It flowed tingling along my veins until it was warm about my heart.
“It is day!” he said.
I heard no more. It was day. A fierce sun blazed upon me and I was alone in an unknown country. A mountain, in contour like the famous Fuji, loomed up majestic, snow spilt down its sides like the sticks of a half opened fan. I stood in a mighty gorge beside a fiercely running mountain river, the swift torrent forced back by its own speed among the rocks in curling white waves. Where two rocks craned forward to each other from opposing shores a noble Chinese bridge, huge stones gigantically moulded almost to a semi-circular spring, spanned and bridled the wild creature beneath, and on either shore was a willow tree.
Why was it familiar though so strange? But I stood bewildered. A moment ago I had been beside my friend in moonlight and quiet, now a great sun beat on tossing mountains and river, and I was alone.
Terribly alone. I stood ignorant which way to turn, helpless, baffled, in a place which might have been empty from the world’s beginning, but for the bridge. Would anyone ever come? Should I roam there imprisoned in vastness until I died? It was a nightmare of terror. I ran to the great willow as if for refuge in its tent of delicate shifting shade, and pushing aside the boughs I entered and sat down throwing my arm about the trunk, smooth, warm, as the flesh of a woman, that I might steady myself against something living and tangible.