'Tera e yuke!'
I have been obliged to return to the European hotel--not because of the
noon-meal, as I really begrudge myself the time necessary to eat it,
but because I cannot make Cha understand that I want to visit a Buddhist
temple. Now Cha understands; my landlord has uttered the mystical words:
'Tera e yuke!'
A few minutes of running along broad thoroughfares lined with gardens
and costly ugly European buildings; then passing the bridge of a canal
stocked with unpainted sharp-prowed craft of extraordinary construction,
we again plunge into narrow, low, bright pretty streets--into another
part of the Japanese city. And Cha runs at the top of his speed between
more rows of little ark-shaped houses, narrower above than below;
between other unfamiliar lines of little open shops. And always over the
shops little strips of blue-tiled roof slope back to the paper-screened
chamber of upper floors; and from all the facades hang draperies dark
blue, or white, or crimson--foot-breadths of texture covered with
beautiful Japanese lettering, white on blue, red on black, black on
white. But all this flies by swiftly as a dream. Once more we cross
a canal; we rush up a narrow street rising to meet a hill; and Cha,
halting suddenly before an immense flight of broad stone steps, sets the
shafts of his vehicle on the ground that I may dismount, and, pointing
to the steps, exclaims: 'Tera!'
I dismount, and ascend them, and, reaching a broad terrace, find
myself face to face with a wonderful gate, topped by a tilted, peaked,
many-cornered Chinese roof. It is all strangely carven, this gate.
Dragons are inter-twined in a frieze above its open doors; and the
panels of the doors themselves are similarly sculptured; and there are
gargoyles--grotesque lion heads--protruding from the eaves. And the
whole is grey, stone-coloured; to me, nevertheless, the carvings do not
seem to have the fixity of sculpture; all the snakeries and dragonries
appear to undulate with a swarming motion, elusively, in eddyings as of
water.
I turn a moment to look back through the glorious light. Sea and sky
mingle in the same beautiful pale clear blue. Below me the billowing of
bluish roofs reaches to the verge of the unruffled bay on the right, and
to the feet of the green wooded hills flanking the city on two sides.
Beyond that semicircle of green hills rises a lofty range of serrated
mountains, indigo silhouettes. And enormously high above the line of
them towers an apparition indescribably lovely--one solitary snowy
cone, so filmily exquisite, so spiritually white, that but for its
immemorially familiar outline, one would surely deem it a shape of
cloud. Invisible its base remains, being the same delicious tint as the
sky: only above the eternal snow-line its dreamy cone appears, seeming
to hang, the ghost of a peak, between the luminous land and the luminous
heaven--the sacred and matchless mountain, Fujiyama.
And suddenly, a singular sensation comes upon me as I stand before this
weirdly sculptured portal--a sensation of dream and doubt. It seems
to me that the steps, and the dragon-swarming gate, and the blue sky
arching over the roofs of the town, and the ghostly beauty of Fuji, and
the shadow of myself there stretching upon the grey masonry, must all
vanish presently. Why such a feeling? Doubtless because the forms before
me--the curved roofs, the coiling dragons, the Chinese grotesqueries
of carving--do not really appear to me as things new, but as things
dreamed: the sight of them must have stirred to life forgotten memories
of picture-books. A moment, and the delusion vanishes; the romance of
reality returns, with freshened consciousness of all that which is
truly and deliciously new; the magical transparencies of distance,
the wondrous delicacy of the tones of the living picture, the enormous
height of the summer blue, and the white soft witchery of the Japanese
sun.