The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk, free of twists and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches, but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless and confined, filled and empty. The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been parked for centuries. I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars. At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart. I have seen the priests with haughty faces,--with head-dresses of horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,--offer the morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the sacred _kagura_,--his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,--has executed the dance which consists of continual advance and retreat. As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin; stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan, the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful, strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction evolves from the idea of a box. Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of furniture,--do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin. The extensions, intersected by carpentry; the oblique shafts, of which the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means by which it may be lifted.