The thousand steps by which I climbed are hidden, and the _chaya_, in the width of the brown road that touches cliff and sea, is so beneath my feet that its roof seems resting on the ground. My _kurumaya_, in his white hat, is a growing mushroom on a dark blue stalk. The man is but a human atom crushed between two immensities. From cliff to distant sky the wide sea spreads out, a vast still plain of shimmering blue. This ball of earth is rolled out flat before my eyes, and its mysterious ends are a far-off rim, dark blue and clear. Overhead the burnished sky shuts down a domed cover on the flattened earth. The very sea seems hot. My _kurumaya_, sitting on the slender shafts of his _jinriksha_, fans himself with his hat, and I am startled to see how perfectly the three-inch figure works. The world lies all spread out below me, here is nothing but the temple and the sun. Across the burning courtyard where the sun smites the rounded pebbles with hard shafts of light, and through the open doorway in the temple’s wall, I go, and then the silent shadows of the trees fall all around. The sky above their tops is bluer, the very sunlight brighter for the shade. The temple’s shrine is built upon a polished raft of wood, moored three feet above the ground. Its walls are dark with matted blind. Only the square door-posts stand clear against the light, and through them I see the bareness of the shrine--a sweep of pale matting on the floor, and then dim space. Alone, the burnished mirror of the great Sun-Goddess hangs above the altar. On the threshold of his temple stands the high priest, attended by two acolytes. He wears a head-dress of black lacquer like a perforated meat-cover, but the face beneath is old and very calm. He bows as I mount the shallow polished steps which lead up from the ground, takes from the black-robed acolyte a slender silver vase, and a shallow terra-cotta bowl. Standing shoeless on the threshold of the naked shrine he slowly pours the sacred _saké_ from the silver vase into the terra-cotta bowl, and gives me to drink. The bowl is black with age, the _saké_ thick, like distilled honey; and I notice, as I drink, the carved figures running round the rim, and the faint scent of plum-blossom. Without a word the white-robed priest takes back the cup, and offers me a thin rice-wafer which I break and eat. I wonder what the rite may mean that I, a stranger, may partake, and look up to see the calm old eyes looking down at me, at my outlandish clothes and foreign face; but he does not speak. Then with a gesture which is almost a blessing, the white-robed priest is gone, and the acolytes follow after. The temple’s shrine stands bare and bare, only the burnished mirror of the great Sun-Goddess glitters. Was it a Passover that we have eaten together? Or a Eucharist? Or merely the symbol of our human brotherhood? We are all children of the Sun; and Faith is One.