t, but unseen.

The evening breeze was cold. In spite of the big wooden fireboxes
strewn over their stall, the Fujinami were shivering.

"Let us go for a walk," suggested cousin Sadako.

The two girls strolled along the ridge of the hill as far as the
five-storied pagoda. They passed the tea-house, so famous for its
plum-blossoms in early March. It was brightly lighted. The paper
rectangles of the _shoji_ were aglow like an illuminated honeycomb.
The wooden walls resounded with the jangle of the _samisen_, the high
screaming _geisha_ voices, and the rough laughter of the guests. From
one room the _shoji_ were pushed open; and drunken men could be seen
with kimonos thrown back from their shoulders showing a body reddened
with _sake_. They had taken the _geishas_' instruments from them, and
were performing an impromptu song and dance, while the girls clapped
their hands and writhed with laughter. Beyond the tea-house, the din
of the festival was hushed. Only from the distance came the echo of
the song, the rasp of the forced merriment, the clatter of the _geta_,
and the hum of the crowd.

Starlight revealed the landscape. The moon was rising through a
cloud's liquescence. Soon the hundreds of rice-plots would catch her
full reflection. The outline of the coast of Tokyo Bay was visible
as far as Yokohama; so were the broad pool of Ikegami and the lumpy
masses of the hills inland.

The landscape was alive with lights, lights dim, lights bright,
lights stationary, lights in swaying movement round each centre of
population. It looked as if the stars had fallen from heaven, and were
being shifted and sorted by careful gleaners. As each nebula of white
illumination assembled itself, it began to move across the vast plain,
drawn inwards towards Ikegami from every point of the compass as
though by a magnetic force. These were the lantern processions of
pilgrims. They looked like the souls of the righteous rising from
earth to heaven in a canto from Dante.

The clusters of lights started, moved onwards, paused, re-grouped
themselves, and struggled forward, until in the narrow street of
the village under the hill Asako could distinguish the shapes of the
lantern-bearers and their strange antics, and the sacred palanquin,
a kind of enormous wooden bee-hive, which was the centre of each
procession, borne on the sturdy shoulders of a swarm of young men to
the beat of drums and the inevitable chant.

_Namu my[=o]h[=o] renge