LITMIR.BIZ

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before his brow; stiff, yet quivering, and sending its quivers through his whole frame. The look of the man was unmistakable. He had gone completely out of himself. Unwittingly we had come to stand witnesses to a trance.

      At the first sign of possession, the exorcist had ceased incanting and sat bowed awaiting the coming presence. When the paroxysmal throes had settled into a steady quiver—much as a top does when it goes off to sleep—he leaned forward, put a hand on either side the possessed's knees, and still bowed, asked in words archaically reverent the name of the god who had thus deigned to descend.

      At first there was no reply. Then in a voice strangely unnatural, without being exactly artificial, the entranced spake: "I am Hakkai."

      The petitioner bent yet lower; then raising his look a little, preferred respectfully what requests he had to make; whether the peak would be clear and the pilgrimage prove propitious, and whether the loved ones left at home would all be guarded by the god? And the god made answer: "Till the morrow's afternoon will the peak be clear, and the pilgrimage shall be blessed."

      The man stayed bowed while the god spake, and when the god had finished speaking, offered up an adoration prayer. Then leaning forward, he first touched the possessed on the breast, and then struck him on the back several times with increasing insistency. Under this ungodly treatment the possessed opened his eyes like one awaking from profound sleep. The others then set to and kneaded his arms, body, and legs, cramped in catalepsy, back to a normal state.

      No sooner was the ex-god himself again than the trio changed places; the petitioner moved into the seat of the entranced, the looker-on took the place of the petitioner, and the entranced retired to the post of looker-on. Then with this change of persons the ceremony was gone through with again to a similar possession, a similar interview, and a similar awakening.

      At the close of the second trance the three once more revolved cyclically and went through the performance for the third time. This rotation in possession so religiously observed was not the least strange detail of this strange drama.

      When the cycle had been completed, the three friends offered up a concluding prayer, and then, donning their outside accoutrements, started upward.

      Revolving in our minds what we had thus so strangely been suffered to see, we too proceeded, and, being faster walkers, had soon distanced our god-acquaintances. We had not been long upon the summit, however, when they appeared again, and no sooner had they arrived, than they sat down upon some other benches similarly standing in the little open space before the tip-top shrine, and went through their cyclical possessions as before. We had not thought to see the thing a second time, and were almost as much astounded as at first.

      Our fear of parting with our young god-friends proved quite groundless. For on returning to the summit-hut after a climb round the crater rim, the first thing to catch our eyes amid its dim religious gloom was the sight of the pious trio once more in the full throes of possession. There were plenty of other pilgrims seated round the caldron fire, as well as some native meteorologists in an annex, who had been exiled there for a month by a paternal government to study the atmospheric conditions of this island in the clouds. Up to the time we met them the weather had been dishearteningly same, consisting, they informed us somewhat pathetically, of uninterrupted fog. The exorcists, however, took no notice of them, nor of any of the other pilgrims, nor did the rest of the company pay the slightest heed to the exorcists; all of which spoke volumes for the commonplaceness of the occurrence.

      We again thought we had seen our last of the gods, and again were we pleasurably disappointed. At five the next morning we had hardly finished a shivery preprandial peep at the sunrise,—all below us a surging sea of cloud,—and turned once more into the hut, when there were the three indefatigables up and communing again by way of breakfast, for they took none other, and an hour later we came upon them before the tip-top shrine, hard at it for the fifth time. And all this between four o'clock one afternoon and six the next morning. The cycle was not always completed, one of the three being much better at possession than the other two, and one much worse, but there were safely ten trances in the few hours that fringed their sleep's oblivion.

      And nobody, apparently, took any cognizance of what was going on, except us and the meteorologists, who came out to fraternize with us, and volunteered comments in a superior manner on the senselessness of the proceeding,—an imported attitude of mind not destitute of caricature.

      Truly the gods were gracious thus to descend so many times; and truly devout their devotees to crave so much communion. Doubtless an inordinate desire for their society is gratifying to the gods, but the frequency of the talks fairly took our breath away, though it had no perceptible effect on the young men's nor on the god's, even at that altitude. The god possessed his devotees with comparative ease; which was edifying but exhausting; for to let another inhabit one's house always proves hard on the furniture. And all this took place on top of a climb of ten thousand feet toward heaven. In spite of it, however, these estimable young men were equal to a tramp all over the place during the rest of the morning. They ascended religiously to all the crater-peaks, and descended as piously to all the crater-pools—and then started on their climb down and their journey home of three hundred and fifty miles, much of it to be done afoot. That night saw them not only off the mountain, but well on their way beyond. How far their holy momentum carried them without stopping I know not, for the last we saw of them was a wave of farewell as they passed the inn where we had put up for the night. But the most surprising part of the endurance lay in the fact that from the moment they began the ascent of the mountain on the early morning of the one day, till they were off it on the late afternoon of the next, they ate nothing and drank only water.

      Such was my introduction to the society of the gods; and this first glimpse of it only piqued curiosity to more. No sooner back in town, therefore, than I made inquiry into the acquaintanceship I had so strangely formed upon the mountain, to receive the most convincing assurance of its divinity. The fact of possession was confirmed readily enough, but my desire for a private repetition of the act itself was received at first with some mystery and more hesitation. However, with one man after another, offishness thawed, until, getting upon terms of cordiality with deity, it was not long before I was holding divine receptions in my own drawing-room. Exalted and exclusive as this best of all society unquestionably was, it proved intellectually, like more mundane society we agree to call the best, undeniably dull. I mention this not because I did not find it well worth knowing, but simply to show that it was every whit the company it purported to be.

      II.

      The revelation thus strangely vouchsafed me turned out to be as far-reaching as it was sincere. There proved to exist a regular system of divine possession, an esoteric cult imbedded in the very heart and core of the Japanese character and instinct, with all the strangeness of that to us enigmatical race.

      That other foreigners should not previously have been admitted to this company of heaven may at first seem the strangest fact of all. Certainly my introduction cannot be due to any special sanctity of my own, if I may judge by what my friends tell me on the subject. Nor can I credit it to any desire on my part to rise in the world, whether to peaks or preferments—an equally base ambition in either case—for Ontaké, though not of every-day ascent, has been climbed by foreigners several times before. Rein, that indefatigable collector of facts and statistics, managed some years ago to get to the top of it and then to the bottom again without seeing anything. The old guide-book, in the person of an enthusiastic pedestrian, contrived to do the like. Other visitors of good locomotive powers also accomplished this feat without penetrating the secret of the mountain. And yet the trances were certainly going on all the time, and the guides who piloted these several gentlemen must have been well aware of the fact.

      The explanation is to be sought elsewhere. The fact is that Japan is still very much of an undiscovered country to us. It is not simply that the language proves so difficult that but few foreigners pass this threshold of acquaintance; but that the farther the foreigner goes, the more he perceives the ideas in the two hemispheres to be fundamentally diverse. What he expects to find does not exist, and what exists he would never dream of looking for.

      Japan is scientifically an undiscovered country

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