The noise dwindled away. The soldiers turned their heads toward Karass, looking at him vacantly. Karass repeated his question, this time even more timidly.

'Your rabbit is in your belly,' came Doobov's voice from the dark. 'Peace -be-to-his soul,' he added a second later, in a praying manner. To which a dozen other voices solemnly responded: 'Am-e-n.'

Karass seemed to understand nothing. With an expression of inquietude on his face, he stood in the midst of the silenced soldiers, passing his eyes from one to another. 'Where is my rabbit?' he asked the third time.

No one answered.

A quiver passed over Karass's face. His eyes opened wide, his lips began to tremble, then two large tears rolled out from his eyes and crept down his cheeks.

Sobered and perplexed, the soldiers looked at Karass, daring to ask no questions.

V

Day was breaking. The stars had already begun to pale and the sky was gray. In the east a strip of orange light appeared above a chain of low hills. Then a rich red glow spread higher up, while a delicate green band took the place of the orange light. Then a thread of gold advanced along the crests of the hills. The sky was growing bluer.

Karass was walking slowly across the soft white snow, his eyes staring straight before him. He entered the tortuous communication pass leading into the trenches, went by the first line, and stopped in a forepost. Here he put his arm on the parapet and, fixing his eyes on some distant point, remained motionless.

The sun had cleared the top of a hill.

The shadow of a small animal crossed the field of Karass's vision. Karass started violently. In an instant he had leaped over on the other side of the parapet, and was racing wildly toward the German trenches and shouting, 'My rabbit! My rabbit!'

A score of rifles snapped in front of him. Hundreds of others immediately joined. Not knowing what was going on, our soldiers began to answer. Then machine guns entered into the action, and finally artillery, ours and the enemy's.

But Karass heard nothing. For him at last the war was over.

WHO in Funakura can walk is there. Motionless they stand in road and field, the silence not the silence of great heat alone, or of the hour of the day, Pan's hour, but the silence of an Oriental place, no note of insect or animal or human being. The mayor is among them, the chief of police, the president of the bank, the two doctors. Thirty years ago there was a missionaire catholique, but no other foreigner has ever visited the village of Funakura in the hiura of Kamitogo in the island of Kiushiu.

The mayor advances. The mayor is unsteady upon his high stilt-like geta. The timid thing in each of us is large in him.

He bows. I bow. He bows again, the crowd behind him bows, and he and I and they bow.

The mayor regrets that life in Kiushiu is crude.

I shake my head.

He takes my protest as a compliment, and bows. I meet his bow with a bow, and he counters my bow with a bow, at each fresh impulse a fresh unrest rippling over the crowd. The crowd is sensitive as a thicket of bamboo, the pliant tops yielding deferentially to every new current of air.

The mayor waves me toward the village that lies half an hour in the distance, and he leads the way, and I follow, and the low rumble of many hundred geta follows me.

A gentleman from the rumble catches

up, talks for a time, and retires. Another catches up, talks, retires.

Once we pass an old woman kneeling by the roadside, and once a boy too lame to meet us, and once an old man. Before each the procession halts. Someone speaks for the crowd, and a dialogue ensues, shy in the presence of the stranger, and astonishing for how it has nothing to do with the occasion, each phrase marked by a formal bow, hands and knees upon the ground, and the nose brought down till it rubs the earth.

'Old man,' begins the speaker for the crowd, 'it must make you very happy to have your daughter home from Tokyo.'

'It makes me very happy.'
'She seems lovely.'
'Nay, she is lovely.'
'Yes, she is lovely.'

A pause. The speaker bows, the crowd bows, the procession moves, the old man, agaze, remains on his knees.

Till now the road has been straight. Just ahead it will bend toward the village. Here a cry breaks the quiet. The cry is peculiar. Even in the shrill of day I am uneasy. I appeal to the mayor. He nods in the direction of a house across rice fields, and as he nods the cry swells once more. It begins strangely, ends strangely, is not of an animal, not of a human being. It is the cry of the insane. An old sage lives in that house with only his wife, and sometimes he shrieks at intervals

through the day, and sometimes is abroad and shrieking all the night, or stalks from door to door and in a tone of summons forewarns the population, as he did of my coming. I am surprised he should be at large. The mayor assures me he is not dangerous, that the insane are rarely kept in an asylum, and the asylum is the jail.

Nevertheless the experience has made me aware of the thirteen hundred miles to Yokohama, has made me conscious of a tip of earth pushed up from the sea, one Occidental on it, many Orientals, the Orientals mumbling quiet, neither the whisperings nor the noddings fathomable, the spirits therefore illimitable, and from the illimitable it is never far to the dreadful. I begin to suffer funny little anxieties about what they may be thinking. I wish absurdly that I did not have to smile and nod. I should like to free my voice, but cannot, as in a dream.

Then a house, then a scattering of houses, then a street lies before us burnt and ancient and deserted not

a person, not a stir. The hard sun is upon it and brings out the uninhabited look. I am thinking of the yellow dead Pompeii, when a girl of about five brings up stock-still before me. She is naked, and her tight brown belly protrudes in gallant fashion. Her eyes are on me, yet she only slowly sees what her eyes see, is shaken by that sight, recovers the use of her good sense, and flees.

The doctor smiles. The doctor has come to point out the house where they found the Buddha with unequal eyes. It was his own mother's experience. She had screamed in her sleep, had been roused by her husband, had related that she had beheld a Buddha with one eye large and one eye small, not an image, but a living god. She knew where she had beheld it. Though it was not yet light, husband and wife

got from bed and went. It was a newcomer to the village. He heard the two amazed people, was not himself amazed, led them where he slept, and there in the earliest streaks of day stood the god, one eye large, and one eye small.

Seeing that this interests me, another points to another house. There were born there in quick succession four daughters, and it is not for daughters that the nation celebrates the Tanabata, so when the fifth child came also a daughter, the father named her Sue, which in our language means Last, and when the sixth came a daughter he called her Mitzu, signifying Enough; but when the seventh was the same, wrath overpowered him, and the whole village heard him bellow, "Tome,' meaning, 'Stop.'

Laughter meets this conclusion, and the procession moves lightly onward.

Mine is one of the grand houses, less Japanese and less lovely. The mayor helps me into the vestibule. Women hasten to take off our shoes, put them with the geta in a trim row before the door.

Before the door every cranny has filled. So many in so narrow a place, all smileless and silent, makes them more than ever a multitude, and now as one piece the multitude bows. Up and down, as far as I can see, every creature is bending.

The mayor draws me into the room, and after us one by one come the village worthies, each rid of his geta by an imperceptible shake, each going to his place as if it had been rehearsed, each letting himself sink till his buttocks have found his heels. I am at the garden end of the large circle. For me there is a pillow. I shall remember it long, this first moment upon my knees, these Japanese gentlemen, like porcelain figures, sedately in a ring. They fan themselves assiduously.

The room smiles in its confidence of dimension. No solitary adornment breaks the openness. Two alcoves lie in the opposite wall; above the one a lattice door; within the other a metal vase, and behind the vase a poem in large ideographs, saying that morality is like the bamboo, meaning that it is straight and strong and true.

The president of the bank whispers to the doctor, who whispers to the mayor, who looks at me, begs me be at my greatest ease, not to sit upon my heels, but to kick my legs freely from under. I obey, it may be too eagerly, for all are amused; the fans express it; and the fluttering floats beyond the room where, in the doorway, in the vestibule, in the street, from every projection of the houses round, sallow faces and squirrel-like eyes follow the scene.

'We are touched by this coming of the friend of a friend of ours,' the mayor begins.

Then another, 'And we hope that the sun has not been too hot.'

'We hope that the dust has not been too heavy.'

'We hope that the road has not been too weary.'

'We are grieved that we have so little to give.'

and a nervous bowing seesaws the air. A gentleman slides up to speak to me alone. It has to do with his perplexity at my having journeyed so far to visit so uncharted a spot. Another comes to tell me of an English teacher in the middle school in Kagoshima who after twenty-five years can speak no Japanese, is married to a Japanese who can speak no English, the partnership ironically happy. One tells me that to-morrow he will show me the sword dance, by which in times of national discouragement the spirit has often been kept alive. One declaims that for scientists and artists there is no nation. One cleaves in: Even should there be war between my country and his, I need have no fear. One hastens to explain that the phrase, 'even should there be war,' implies only an extreme contingency.

Then out of the crowd someone calls for banzai. Banzai means ten thousand years of prosperity. Each gentleman at once shifts from his haunches forward to his knees, the swarthy circle seeming fiercely to come down upon me. Lugubriously and marvelously someone pronounces my name. Lugubriously and marvelously all pronounce it after him, and on the

The talk that continues so simple has yet something singular. At first I thought it ignorance of words, but now I know that it is more than words. There is an emphasis that resides wholly within the idea, and still wears as an insistent rhythm wears. The drum in Oriental music has grossly that effect. It is as if the speech smothered a passion in the thought, so that, though the thought could glow, it could not flame. As it heats, however, its sense clears. The interpreter is easier to follow.

I rise and stretch upon my toes and feel myself thin and tall. For the first time I note how very low the room is. Everything was meant to be seen from one's knees. The lovely instinct worked from that point, conceived the garden, and placed the narrow street. The latter is deserted now, the sun is gone, and round me in an empty room runs a ring of empty cups.

II

The light has begun to fade. The garden walled, the trees dwarfed, a rain basin cut as if by water long dripping on rock, straw-roofed outhouses with toyhouse angles-all that even at noon must be unreal when twilight falls is dream. It seems somehow somewhere else, and I myself in no such undoubted place as Funakura in Satsuma in Kiushiu.

A great Japanese emperor once said: "Twilight is everywhere.' He was looking then, as I am looking now, out upon dream, and I see that such a setting may give a simple musing depth. I believe the schoolboy who tells me the words are a poem, that they may even be a great poem.

Did the emperor mean that some hour of beauty is part of every place and thing? Or did he mean merely that the immensities are common, to every creature sun and air? Being an emperor, it is the latter that he meant, very likely; yet one may have hoped, knowing now how unutterable are the twilights in these islands, that there was something also of the former. The former is what the twilight means. It is as were it saying: 'Follow me; see how I float lightly out of the heaviness of night, and how I conclude in an intelligible gentleness the unintelligible hardness of day; twice in each diurnal revolution I cast this mantle of mood, cast it always with a feeling of flight;

when I glower, I smile; from a capacity that never knew ache of emptiness I bring always the fresh kakemono.'

In the little street a holy man goes by, lifts his eyes heavenward, drops them again, chooses to look within instead of without. A student under a stupendous straw, more like a sail than a hat, reads in a book as he walks, stumbles nearly headlong, but sticks to his page. An elderly man contends with an elderly man, passionately and all-excludingly, his coachman of the emblazoned ramshackle coach watching apparently nothing more remarkable than the dirt that is driving backward while he is driving forward. But Buddha is wise. He expects a slow conviction, or perhaps he expects none, paints for the charm of painting. Tonight he uses grays-pale grays and heavy, grays far away that are nearly black, grays overhead that are like the grays in Dutch skies with the filmiest overlay of gold, and in the west above the rooftops a gray that is drunk with red.

Silently, as is the rule of the Japanese meal, we hurry through the rice and tea. To-night the village fêtes the god of business. The god of business is not important among gods; his affair has been left to boys of fifteen. Early they canvassed for paper lanterns, brought them to the end of the street, where the village shrine stands upon a mound of ground.

At the foot of the mound are two tall poles, and on the top of the poles, but as if high above and pressed into the pale heaven, two pale lanterns. With the darkening these take body, and those yellow ones low along the ground grow yellower. One by one the houses bring forth the lanterns of the houses, the coats of arms upon them smeared by weather. Patches of holiday kimono stamp increasingly this gilded darkness. The darkness