From Sea to Sea; Letters of TravelKipling, Rudyard
General
From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel
Kipling, Rudyard
Asia -- Description and travel; Kipling, Rudyard, 1865-1936 -- Travel; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
To-morrow brought fine drizzling rain. The sun, by the way, has been
hidden now for more than three weeks. They took us to what must be the
chief temple of Kobé and gave it a name which I do not remember. It is
an exasperating thing to stand at the altars of a faith that you know
nothing about. There be rites and ceremonies of the Hindu creed that all
have read of and must have witnessed, but in what manner do they pray
here who look to Buddha, and what worship is paid at the Shinto shrines?
The books say one thing; the eyes, another.
The temple would seem to be also a monastery and a place of great peace
disturbed only by the babble of scores of little children. It stood back
from the road behind a sturdy wall, an irregular mass of steep pitched
roofs bound fantastically at the crown, copper-green where the thatch
had ripened under the touch of time, and dull grey-black where the tiles
ran. Under the eaves a man who believed in his God, and so could do good
work, had carved his heart into wood till it blossomed and broke into
waves or curled with the ripple of live flames. Somewhere on the
outskirts of Lahore city stands a mazy gathering of tombs and cloister
walks called Chajju Bhagat's Chubara, built no one knows when and
decaying no one cares how soon. Though this temple was large and
spotlessly clean within and without, the silence and rest of the place
were those of the courtyards in the far-off Punjab. The priests had made
many gardens in corners of the wall--gardens perhaps forty feet long by
twenty wide, and each, though different from its neighbour, containing a
little pond with goldfish, a stone lantern or two, hummocks of rock,
flat stones carved with inscriptions, and a cherry or peach tree all
blossom.
Stone-paved paths ran across the courtyard and connected building with
building. In an inner enclosure, where lay the prettiest garden of all,
was a golden tablet ten or twelve feet high, against which stood in high
relief of hammered bronze the figure of a goddess in flowing robes. The
space between the paved paths here was strewn with snowy-white pebbles,
and in white pebbles on red they had written on the ground, "How happy."
You might take them as you pleased--for the sigh of contentment or the
question of despair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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