and a great camphor tree, centuries old, soared out into the
blue like a green balloon.

Behind the camphor tree, again, and not visible from the garden below,
stood a temple of the "Shingon" sect, the most mystic of the old
esoteric Buddhist forms. To the rear of this the broad, low,
rectangular buildings of a nunnery, gray and old as the temple itself
brooded among high hedges of the sacred mochi tree. This retreat had
been famous for centuries throughout Japan. More than once a Lady
Abbess had been yielded from the Imperial family. Formerly the temple
had owned many koku of rich land; had held feudal sway over rice fields
and whole villages, deriving princely revenue. With the restoration of
the Emperor to temporal power, some thirty years before the beginning
of this story, most of the land had been confiscated; and now, shrunken
like the papal power at Rome, the temple claimed, in land, only those
acres bounded by its own hedges and stone temple walls. There were the
main building itself, silent, impressive in towering majesty;
subordinate chapels and dwellings for priests, a huge smoke-stained
refectory, the low nunnery in its spreading gardens and, down the
northern slope of the hill, the cemetery, a lichen-growth, as it were,
of bristling, close-set tombs in gray stone, the splintered regularity
broken in places by the tall rounded column of a priest's grave, set in
a ring of wooden sotoba. At irregular intervals clusters of giant
bamboo trees sprang like green flame from the fissures of gray rock.

Even in humiliation, in comparative poverty, the temple dominated, for
miles around, the imagination of the people, and was the great central
note of the landscape. The immediate neighborhood was jealously proud
of it. Country folk, journeying by the street below, looked up with
lips that whispered invocation. Children climbed the long stone steps
to play in the temple courtyard, and feed the beautiful tame doves that
lived among the carved dragons of the temple eaves.

In that gray cemetery on the further slope Kano's wife, the young
mother who died so long ago that Ume-ko could not remember her at all,
slept beneath a granite shaft which said, "A Flower having blossomed in
the Night, the Halls of the Gods are fragrant." This was the Buddhist
kaimyo, or priestly invocation to the spirit of the dead. Of the more
personal part of the young mother, her name, age, and the date of her
"divine retirement," t