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We have arrived at the temple courtyard. This is the last and most astonishing scene in the evening's fairy-tale a luminous and weird scene, with fantastic distances lighted up by the moon, with the gigantic trees, the sacred cryptomerias, elevating their sombre boughs into a vast dome.
There were spreading cedar trees, black like the tents of Bedouins, and there were straight cryptomerias for the masts of fairy ships. There was a strange tree, whose light-green foliage grew in round clumps like trays of green lacquer at the extremities of twisted brandies, a natural étagère.
We have arrived at the temple courtyard. This is the last and most astonishing scene in the evening's fairy-tale a luminous and weird scene, with fantastic distances lighted up by the moon, with the gigantic trees, the sacred cryptomerias, elevating their sombre boughs into a vast dome.
Along a magnificent avenue they rode, built through a forest of cryptomerias towering one hundred and eighty feet high, some of them with trunks thirty feet in diameter. They were like the columns of a gigantic cathedral of which the sky was the dome.
The day was bright and the views from the car window gave one an ever-varying panorama, consisting of mountains, a long avenue of tall cryptomerias that seemed to extend for miles, cultivated fields, and luxuriant vegetation freshened by the recent rain. Nature put forth her loveliest Spring tints, to which cherry blossoms ever and anon gave a touch of color.
In front of the inn ripples a clear stream, spanned by two bridges, one of which is arched and furnished with a red parapet. Only the Emperor and his family may step on to this bridge; other mortals must pass over another bridge near at hand. On the farther side we ascend a tremendously long avenue of grand cryptomerias rising straight up to the sky.
Big cryptomerias shade the broad stony path along much of its southern slope to Hakone village and lake. Hakone is a very lovely and interesting region, nowadays a favorite summer resort of the European residents of Tokio and Yokohama. From the latter place Hakone Lake is but about fifty miles distant, and by jinrikisha and kago may be reached in one day.
She was glad when the irritating day was over, when the rosy sunset clouds showed through the trunks of the cryptomerias, when the night fell and the great stars like lamps hung in the branches. But the night brought no silence. Paper lanterns were lighted round the temple; and rough acetylene flares lit up the tawdry fairings.
Every one who has been to Europe will recall the long lines of Lombardy poplars that make the fair vision of many French roads linger long in the memory, and I can never forget the magnificent avenue of cryptomerias gigantic in size, straight as ship masts, fair as the cedars of Lebanon that line the road leading to the great Shogun Iyeyasu's tomb in Nikko.
Sitting there, amidst a grove of enormous cryptomerias and bamboos, there is an air of ineffable silent strength about that solitary figure, which affords a clue to the tenacity with which the poorer classes cling to Buddhism.
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