eker, and went conscientiously the round of the
temples mentioned in their classic pages. Two American girls were
provided with Hearn's books, and had made up their minds to go off on an
extended expedition, visiting Matsue and the fishing villages along the
northern coast.

A week of cloudless weather reigned over the land, and in company with
these American ladies I went to various places of interest, clambering
up flights of steps, along avenues leading to ancient shrines, under the
dim shadow of centenarian trees; puzzling over the incomprehensible
lettering on moss-grown tombstones and _sotobas_, gazing at sculptures
of Buddha in meditation, Buddha with uplifted hand, Buddha asleep in the
heavenly calm of Nirvana. But all these smaller Buddhas sank into
insignificance before the great Buddha of Enoshima, the celebrated Dai
Batsu. Somehow as I stood before this colossal image of calm, backed by
the cloudless eastern sky, a memory was recalled of the granite image
that crouches on the edge of the Sahara Desert. The barbaric Egyptian
had invested his conception with talons, and surrounded it with sinister
legends; but the same strange sense of infinity broods over both.
Solemn, impenetrable, amidst the upheavals and decay of dynasties and
people, the Sphinx sits patiently gazing into futurity. Here, on this
Japanese coast, tidal waves overwhelm towns, earthquakes and fire
destroy temples, but this bronze Buddha, throned on his lotus,
contemplates the changes and chances passing around him, an immutable
smile on his chiselled lips. Hitherto I had looked upon the people of
this ancient Nippon as utterly alien in thought and point of view, but
here, along roads thousands of miles apart, from out the centuries of
time, oriental and occidental met and forgathered. No one knows if a
master mind directed the hands of the artificers that hewed out the
great Sphinx, or brazed the sheets of bronze to shape the mighty image
of the Dai Batsu; rather do they seem the endeavour of a people to
incarnate the idea that eternity presents to man the vagueness and
vastness of something beyond and above themselves. The humanity of
centuries will be driven as the sand of the desert about the granite
base of the Sahara's Sphinx, nations will break as the waves of the sea
round the lotus-pedestal of the Kamakura Buddha, while, deep and still
as the heavens themselves, both remain to tell mankind the eternal
truth: ambition and success, exult