Beneath the short thick hair of the _kurumaya_ the heat gathered in wet patches on the white scalp, rolled in big drops over the black head, trickled down the bronze neck, and was wiped off with one rapid movement of the blue cotton towel, as the running _kurumaya_ sped swiftly on; gathered again, rolled again, trickled again, was wiped dry again; gathered, rolled, trickled, until the automatic movements, repeated and repeated, grew part of Time itself. They were Time. * * * * * Then I awoke. It was as if some one had slid a thin lining of fresh air along the tops of the blue hills, beneath the burning sky. A thin, thin sheet of fresh air, but the green earth gave a great sigh, the _kurumaya_ a little shake, and I awoke. The peasants in their brown thatched houses, open as a shed, were stirring, the naked red figures in their white cloths were moving down the road. In the fields the long bamboo poles that shot up out of the green earth like masts were dipping up and down, drawing water for the thirsty rice. The little birds on the telegraph wires were chirping sleepily, flying off in twos and threes, and settling down again, audibly fussing over the laziness of their friends and relations. The bright night-time of heat was over and gone. I sat up in my _kuruma_ and looked. We were running through green rice-fields, under a blue sky. And it was a hot summer’s afternoon. III IZUMO’S GREAT TEMPLE “So they made fast the temple pillars on the nethermost rock-bottom, and they made high the cross-beams to the plain of high heaven;” and the god Onamuji, the “Master of the Great Land,” King of Izumo, in accordance with his compact with high heaven, entered into that temple and dwelt there. So the province of Izumo and the kingdom of Western Japan passed under the rule of the great Sun-Goddess whose descendants endure to this day. But the Master of the Great Land, the god Onamuji, is worshipped from end to end of the Emperor’s dominions, and his temple and his priests are sacred as the mirror of the Sun-Goddess in their eyes. All through the year, the pilgrims in thousands journey into Izumo to remote Kizuki, whose name to their ears is still resonant with the beating (_tsuku_) of the pestles (_ki_) which made the foundations of that first great temple firm and everlasting, while in the month of October the immortal gods themselves, from every shrine throughout the land, come to visit Onamuji, and that desolate month known in Japan as _kami-na-zuki_ (month without gods) is called in Izumo alone _kami-ari-zuki_ (the month with gods). At the foot of the everlasting hills the temple stands, and the far-off ripple of the Western Sea, half a memory, half a dream, wanders through its sunlit courts, a sound to listening ears.