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Not far from the site of the Rengaji, in the grounds of the great hakaba of the Kwannondera, there stands a most curious pine. The trunk of the tree is supported, not on the ground, but upon four colossal roots which lift it up at such an angle that it looks like a thing walking upon four legs.
After the supper and the bath, feeling too warm to sleep, I wander out alone to visit the village hakaba, a long cemetery upon a sandhill, or rather a prodigious dune, thinly covered at its summit with soil, but revealing through its crumbling flanks the story of its creation by ancient tides, mightier than tides of to-day. I wade to my knees in sand to reach the cemetery.
And now, although it is growing dark, I am going to the cemetery to see what has been done at the grave. Would you like to come with me? We take our way over the long white bridge, up the shadowy Street of the Temples, toward the ancient hakaba of Miokoji and the darkness grows as we walk. A thin moon hangs just above the roofs of the great temples.
And with the consciousness of the ancient hakaba behind me, and the weird invitation of its lanterns, and the ghostly beliefs of the hour and the place there creeps upon me a nameless, tingling sense of being haunted.
Such visions always indicate the approach of villages; but the villages prove to be as surprisingly small as the cemeteries are surprisingly large. By hundreds of thousands do the silent populations of the hakaba outnumber the folk of the hamlets to which they belong tiny thatched settlements sprinkled along the leagues of coast, and sheltered from the wind only by ranks of sombre pines.
Now many of these villages are only fishing settlements, and in them stand old thatched homes of men who sailed away on some eve of tempest, and never came back. Yet each drowned sailor has his tomb in the neighbouring hakaba, and beneath it something of him has been buried. What?
For many days they slept there; then somebody found them, and a bed was made for them in the hakaba of the Temple of Kwannon-of-the- Thousand-Arms. And the innkeeper, having heard these things, gave the futon to the priests of the temple, and caused the kyo to be recited for the little souls. And the futon ceased thereafter to speak.
Behind each temple court there is a cemetery, or hakaba; and eastward beyond these are other temples, and beyond them yet others masses of Buddhist architecture mixed with shreds of gardens and miniature homesteads, a huge labyrinth of mouldering courts and fragments of streets.
And about them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with similar fantastic lettering, pierce the green gloom by thousands, by tens of thousands. And before I can note other details, I know that I am in a hakaba, a cemetery a very ancient Buddhist cemetery.
It is as if one were passing through the burial-ground of all who ever lived on this wind-blown shore since the being of the land. And in all these hakaba for it is the Bon there are new lanterns before the newer tombs the white lanterns which are the lanterns of graves. To-night the cemeteries will be all aglow with lights like the fires of a city for multitude.
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