nd the heavens
"seemed very near, and warm, and human; and the silence about us was
filled with the dream of a love unchanging, immortal, for ever yearning
and for ever young, and for ever left unsatisfied by the paternal wisdom
of the Gods."

The open port of Kobe came like an awakening out of a delicious dream.
It was impossible not to feel exasperated with the Germans, Englishmen
and Americans who have desecrated an earthly paradise with red-brick
erections, factory chimneys, and plate-glass shop-fronts; easy was it to
understand Hearn's railings against the modernisation of the country.

Not far, however, had the foreign wedge been driven in. After a short
_kuruma_ journey from the landing-stage to the hotel, we were back again
in the era of Kusimoki Marahige.

Foreign names may have been given to the hills, and stretches of sea
coast,--Aden, Bismarck Hill, Golf Links Valley;--ancient Nippon keeps
them as her own, with their Shinto and Buddhist temples, surrounded by
woods of cryptomeria and camphor-trees. Their emotional and intellectual
life is no more altered by their occidental neighbours than the surface
of a mirror is changed by passing reflections, as says their
interpreter, Lafcadio Hearn.

Next to the hotel--as if to emphasise its nationality--was an ancient
pine-surrounded cemetery, set with tall narrow laths of unpainted wood;
while behind, to the summit of the hill, stretched a blue-grey sea of
tiles, a cedar world of _engawa_ and _shoji_, indescribable
whimsicalities, representing another world in its picturesqueness and
grotesquery. But it was not only in these visible objects that a
strange, unexpected life manifested itself. In the street, as you passed
along, dim surmises of some inscrutable humanity--another race soul,
charming, fascinating, and yet alien to your own, formulated itself to
your western consciousness. The bowing, the smiling, the arrangement of
flowers in the poorest shanties, the banners and lanterns with
marvellous drawings and ideographs; the children singing nursery rhymes
in an unknown language; others sitting naked in hot tubs, a woman with
elaborately dressed hair stuck over with large-headed pins, and rouged
and powdered cheeks, cleansing her teeth over the street gutter, while
behind were glimpses of curious interiors where men and women were
squatting on the floor like Buddhas, some reading, some with brushes
writing on long strips of paper from right to left.

Enigma