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We walk along the main street for a distance of about six squares, and then, making a tum, find ourselves before a superb bronze torii, the gateway to the great temple avenue. Effacing colours and obliterating distances, night always magnifies by suggestion the aspect of large spaces and the effect of large objects.
It stands in the same court with a temple of Benten, and is more than usually large for a shrine of Inari. You approach it through a succession of torii one behind the other: they are of different heights, diminishing in size as they are placed nearer to the temple, and planted more and more closely in proportion to their smallness.
Some people give towels, some give pictures, some give vases; some offer lanterns of paper, or bronze, or stone. It is common to promise such offerings when making petitions to the gods; and it is usual to promise a torii.
Then, having traversed the valley, we reach a main road so level and so magnificently shaded by huge old trees that I could believe myself in an English lane a lane in Kent or Surrey, perhaps but for some exotic detail breaking the illusion at intervals; a torii, towering before temple-steps descending to the highway, or a signboard lettered with Chinese characters, or the wayside shrine of some unknown god.
There is a lofty flight of steps here also, and before them a structure which I know is both a gate and a symbol, imposing, yet in no manner resembling the great Buddhist gateway seen before. Astonishingly simple all the lines of it are: it has no carving, no colouring, no lettering upon it; yet it has a weird solemnity, an enigmatic beauty. It is a torii. 'Miya, observes Cha.
Near the temple there is an imposing pagoda, also of ancient date, and on an adjacent knoll another shrine. Returning to the hotel, we noted many more stone lanterns, and still another temple with its attendant torii. We also passed through the lane-like streets of the village, thickly lined with bazars; the shops were filled with many tasteful articles, carved wood being a specialty in Miyajima.
We pass the sand-flats; and the ever-open Portal of the Sea- city, the City of the Dragon-goddess, is before us, a beautiful torii.
Formerly no foreigner was permitted to pass beyond the middle torii The avenue terminates at a lofty wall pierced by a gateway resembling the gateways of Buddhist temple courts, but very massive. This is the entrance to the outer court; the ponderous doors are still open, and many shadowy figures are passing in or out.
We glide through it in ten minutes, reach open water again, and Hinomisaki is before us-a semicircle of houses clustering about a bay curve, with an opening in their centre, prefaced by a torii. Of all bays I have ever seen, this is the most extraordinary.
Many of these still remain even after the national purgation of 1870, just as the Christian inscriptions survive in the marble palimpsests of Mahometan mosques, converted from basilicas, at Damascus or Constantinople. The torii was no longer raised in plain hinoki wood, but was now constructed of hewn stone, rounded or polished.
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