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There were real weeds and trees, and sotoba and haka, and the effect was quite natural. Moreover, as the roof was very lofty, and kept invisible by a clever arrangement of lights, all seemed darkness only; and this gave one a sense of being out under the night, a feeling accentuated by the chill of the air.
He began this work by taking one chunk of obsidian and throwing it against another; several small pieces were thus shattered off. One of these, approximately three inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick, was selected as suitable for an arrowhead, or haka.
But I can discern that these are not haka, but six images of one divinity; and my guide knows him Koshin, the God of Roads. So chipped and covered with scurf he is, that the upper portion of his form has become indefinably vague; his attributes have been worn away. But below his feet, on several slabs, chiselled cunningly, I can still distinguish the figures of the Three Apes, his messengers.
But as the eyes grow accustomed to the gloaming it becomes manifest that these were never haka; they are only little towers of stone and pebbles deftly piled up by long and patient labour. 'Shinda kodomo no shigoto, my kurumaya murmurs with a compassionate smile; 'all this is the work of the dead children. And we disembark.
Then the yama-no-mono folk remove the planks which separate the pair making the two coffins into one; above the reunited dead the earth is heaped; and a haka, bearing in chiselled letters the story of their fate, and perhaps a little poem, is placed above the mingling of their dust. There is a fatalistic belief that if one shinju occurs among the inmates of a joroya, two more are sure to follow.
These have been set up as votive tablets, as commemorative monuments, as tombstones, and are much more costly than the ordinary cut-stone columns and haka chiselled with the figures of divinities in relief.
Also, on the same night, those who have dead friends go to the cemeteries and make offerings there, and pray, and burn incense, and pour out water for the ghosts. Flowers are placed there in the bamboo vases set beside each haka, and lanterns are lighted and hung up before the tombs, but these lanterns have no designs upon them.
All relaxed now, to receive the praises of the governor and the brimming glasses once more offered by the diligent Haabunai and Song, aided by the gendarme. A gruesome cannibal chant followed, accompanied by the booming of the drums, and then, warmed by the liquor that fired their brains, the dancers began the haka, the sexual dance.
From the sea the ribbed floor of the cavern slopes high through deepening shadows hack to the black mouth of a farther grotto; and all that slope is covered with hundreds and thousands of forms like shattered haka.
"Menike haka!" came the cry from each house I passed, for the news had been called over the distance, and to the farthest reaches of the valley it was known that an American, the American who had come on the Roberta, with a box that wrote, was dancing along the route.
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