We cannot sleep, the mere transition from the greater heat outside to the cooler heat of this open matted space makes us wakeful. It is cooler here actually, in degree, and imaginatively, from the green palms of the baby garden. The garden of a doll’s house, which any moderate-sized bath-towel would have roofed, yet with a forest of dwarf palm-trees in one corner, a winding pool in another, the cool grey outlines of a stone lantern to hold the eyes, and a sense of still greenness, of limpid freshness, which not rivers of water or forests of giant trees could more distinctly convey. To look at that garden was to take a mental bath and drown out the sense of heat. But the heat itself remained, intense and stagnant, a heavy presence in the house that permeated all things. Out in the courtyard one shaft of burning light shone down, turning the cotton towel on its bamboo line to a white-hot banner, the polished passage to a molten pool, while the water in the big stone font was warm as condensed steam. Like the flaming sword of the Archangel Michael, the shaft of burning light cut the passage-way in two, and the sharp white-heat of it seemed to cut. It was absolutely still, only the heat moved awake in a house and a world asleep. * * * * * Very slowly the little _nēsan_ sat up; some one had called her. A moment, and she was on her feet, neat as a growing flower. “The _kurumaya_ awaits,” she said, kneeling on the matting, “when it honourably pleases the august ones to come.” Then she touched her forehead to the floor and waited for what it honourably pleased the august ones to do. They came, down the polished passage, under the flaming sword of light, out into the open space before the tea-house, where the little policeman waited to command them to be packed into their _kuruma_, to deliver stringent orders for their safe conduct to the _kurumaya_, to authoritatively bid them the politest of _sayonara_. The crowd had disappeared, harangued out of existence; the village street was empty as a desert, the houses dead; and then the steep line of blue hills grew up on either side, shutting in the sky, and the long white road stretched away through the green earth. Palpable, visible, the heat lay over the land, quivering against the white sky, floating round the blue hills, humming in the still air, drowsing me into a somnambulant life that was neither sleep nor waking. Between the green earth and the white sky the telegraph wires cut a bronze line against the quivering blue; and the rows of little birds, all sitting with their tails to the road, hung drowsily there, rows on rows of them. And still the long white road ran on and on.