Kakemono

On every side the circle of the hills shuts out all sounds, and the vast forest stretches solemn, sombre.

The long two miles of white road from the village are forgotten, the crude sunshine of the public gardens fades away, the giant fir-trees stand as they stood two thousand years ago when the shrine of the great Sun-Goddess first was born.

The broad grey path of unhewn stone, unshadowed in the darkness of the trees, bends downward to the river’s brink, where a grey still pool lies silent on the edge of the rushing stream. It is the Pool of Purification where all who go up to the temple stay and wash. Even the kurumaya who daily draws the pilgrim or the stranger to the shrine, stoops to plunge his hands and feet into the still grey waters. And as he does so a great shaft of sunshine hits the weltering circle of the hills beyond the stream, and they quiver, blue as a distant mirage in the blue sky; while the forest is the darker for that light.

The grey stone path is long and wide, the forest vast, unfathomable; primæval, untamed, and yet kept with a care that leaves no trace behind; the forest of a dream where Death is not, nor decay, nor any sign of man. From time to time the dark stern stems of the cryptomerias are broken with the glossy deep-green leaves of a camphor-tree; and each time my kurumaya stays to pray, for camphor-trees are sacred, and their bark thrown into the sea has power to calm the waves.

And the forest stretches on and on.

In the distance the grey stone path broadens into a flight of shallow steps, and passes beneath an open gateway out of sight. A wooden wall, like the sloughed bark of forest trees, stretches right and left; and against it, rigid in his discipline, the white uniform of a modern soldier, bayonet fixed.

I stand on the threshold of the most sacred spot in all Japan.

Beyond the gateway is another gate, where a pure white curtain falls, fold on fold. It is the veil of the great Sun-Goddess. All through the ages since first the nation was, the shrine of the Sun-Goddess has stood behind that veil. Every twenty years night comes, her temple dies, and again is born, unchanged, unaltered to the last least detail. And her priests are the carpenters. So through all the ages, the body of the great Sun-Goddess glows, in youth eternal, and none save her far-off offspring, Tenshisama, the Son of Heaven, may pass behind the veil.

The Japanese soldier stays to guard, for did the stranger, sacrilegious in his foolish pride, so much as touch those long white folds, evil might befall him. Viscount Mori died beneath the sword of a samurai for lifting but the edge of the curtain with his stick.

My kurumaya is on his knees before these fluttering, mysterious folds, two claps, a bow, a little murmured prayer; another bow, two claps, and he rises.

Then he leads us along inside the wooden wall, and another grey-green wooden wall, built as it were of flattened tree-trunks, rises on the other side, leads us a few yards, and then he stops. The outer wooden wall runs round a huge imperfect square, then comes a broad band of space where we are standing, and then the inner wall rails out the world. Inside and opposite the curtained gateway, but with the whole distance of the sacred square between, stands the shrine itself, a grey-brown wooden building, unpainted, unadorned; a grey-brown roof of thatch, with the cross-beams of its roof-tree rising up through the thatch in two rough wooden anchors bound with gold. A building that is simple, with a simplicity more strange to modern man than the strangest complexity, archaic, primæval, a ghost from man’s dim past.

The silent sombre trees stand thickly round. Beyond the circle of blue hills shuts out all sounds. The folds of the white curtain fall straight and close.

My kurumaya prays again.

And there behind her veil the great Sun-Goddess dwells, untouched by time, of an age with the hills, more primitive than the forest trees—and sacred still.