Then he leads us along inside the wooden wall, and another grey-green wooden wall, built as it were of flattened tree-trunks, rises on the other side, leads us a few yards, and then he stops. The outer wooden wall runs round a huge imperfect square, then comes a broad band of space where we are standing, and then the inner wall rails out the world. Inside and opposite the curtained gateway, but with the whole distance of the sacred square between, stands the shrine itself, a grey-brown wooden building, unpainted, unadorned; a grey-brown roof of thatch, with the cross-beams of its roof-tree rising up through the thatch in two rough wooden anchors bound with gold. A building that is simple, with a simplicity more strange to modern man than the strangest complexity, archaic, primæval, a ghost from man’s dim past. The silent sombre trees stand thickly round. Beyond the circle of blue hills shuts out all sounds. The folds of the white curtain fall straight and close. My _kurumaya_ prays again. And there behind her veil the great Sun-Goddess dwells, untouched by time, of an age with the hills, more primitive than the forest trees--and sacred still. III THE TEMPLE OF NIKKŌ In all the pomp of splendour and of power they buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, and the greatest artists of Old Japan came and built in his memory a temple more beautiful than any in all the length and breadth of the land. For more than forty years they worked, and brains and money and labour were poured out like mountain water, until the temple stood complete, the mausoleum of Iyeyasu and the eternal monument of this artistic race. With Buddhist rites was the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for many hundred years daily remembered in a ritual as solemn as it is effective, but Buddha himself has not anywhere a temple so splendid. They buried Iyeyasu at Nikkō, not in the town of his birth or of his death, not in the city over which he ruled, but four days’ journey from Yedo in the midst of the mountains; and they did it that Japan’s greatest ruler might lie amid the nation’s best in nature as in art, that to the splendour of the temple the Land herself might add the glories of her mountains and her trees. At Nikkō is the great _Shōgun_ buried, and for twenty miles before his shrine a stately avenue of trees leads up to the temple, and up this avenue prince and pilgrim yearly come; prince and pilgrim, priest and peasant they still come, up the great avenue of dark thick-set cryptomerias, the giant pine-trees of Japan. At the temple’s foot a mountain stream rushes in a deep green gorge, and two bridges cross the stream: one bright red, the bridge of the Son of Heaven, one painted green, for the rest of this world’s humankind.