THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST
When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge, heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights, a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country. In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains; in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold, black as coal; thenyellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun, this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees, correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise? Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu, chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb.
The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple.
Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double avenue of these giant trees,—which extends twenty leagues to conduct from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents to this ancestral shrine,—but this morning, at the hour when the first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold night.
The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk,free of twists and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches, but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless and confined, filled and empty.
The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been parked for centuries.
I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars. At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart. I have seen the priests with haughty faces,—with head-dresses of horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,—offerthe morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the sacredkagura,—his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,—has executed the dance which consists of continual advance and retreat.
As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin; stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan, the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful, strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction evolves from the idea of a box.
Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of furniture,—do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin. The extensions, intersected bycarpentry; the oblique shafts, of which the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means by which it may be lifted.
Houses? Yes. Here the very sanctuary is a house. They have relegated the bones, sealed in a cylinder of bronze, to the high mountainside; but in this room, seated on the unalterable name, the soul of the dead continues a spectral habitation in obscure and secret splendor. Reversing the procedure which employs wood and stone and makes them of value without adding any strange element to their own properties, artifice has existed here only to annihilate its material. These enclosures, the sides of these boxes, these floors and ceilings, are no longer made of beams and planks but of certain opaque images conjured forth. Color decorates and adorns the wood, lacquer drowns it under impenetrable waters, paint covers it with enchantments, sculpture deeply undermines and transfigures it. An end of timber—the least spike appearing on the magic surface—is covered with arabesques and interlacing lines; but, as on screens we see trees in flower and mountains steeped in a radiant glow, these palaces emerge entirely golden.On the roofs, on the façades, which strike the full light of day, only the ridges are burnished with scattered brightness; but the sides are brightened in vast surfaces through the shadow; and inside also, the six walls of the box are painted with the splendors of hidden treasure, flaming brilliance revealed by numerous mirrors.
Thus the magnificent shogun does not inhabit a house of mere wood, but his dwelling in the center of the forest is in the light of setting suns; and ambrosial incense abides beneath these sweeping boughs. Through the immense spaces of this region, deeply slumbering like a god amid its sea of trees, an occasional dazzling cascade plashes between the leaves, mingling with their ceaseless whisper.