He, without stopping, shouted back:—- "Everywhere now the same thing is. Much time-in rain has not been: so the gods-to prayers are made, and drums are beaten." We flashed through other villages; and I saw and heard more drums of various sizes, and from hamlets invisible, over miles of parching rice-fields, yet other drums, like echoings, responded.
[1] See The Classical Poetry of the Japanese, by Professor Chamberlain, in Trübner's Oriental Series. According to Western chronology, Urashima went fishing in 477 A.D., and returned in 825.
IV
Then I began to think about Urashima again. I thought of the pictures and poems and proverbs recording the influence of the legend upon the imagination of a race. I thought of an Izumo dancing-girl I saw at a banquet acting the part of Urashima, with a little lacquered box whence there issued at the tragical minute a mist of Kyōto incense. I thought about the antiquity of the beautiful dance,—and therefore about vanished generations of dancing-girls,—and therefore about dust in the abstract; which, again, led me to think of dust in the concrete, as bestirred by the sandals of the kurumaya to whom I was to pay only seventy-five sen. And I wondered how much of it might be old human dust, and whether in the eternal order of things the motion of hearts might be of more consequence than the motion of dust. Then my ancestral morality took alarm; and I tried to persuade myself that a story which had lived for a thousand years, gaining fresher charm with the passing of every century, could only have survived by virtue of some truth in it. But what truth? For the time being I could find no answer to this question.
The heat had become very great; and I cried,—
"O kurumaya! the throat of Selfishness is dry; water desirable is."
He, still running, answered:—
"The Village of the Long Beach inside of—not far—a great gush-water is. There pure august water will be given."
I cried again:—