myself! That is, outside of my own imagination.

10

'Tera?' once more queries Cha.

'Tera, no--it is getting late. Hotel, Cha.'

But Cha, turning the corner of a narrow street, on our homeward route,
halts the jinricksha before a shrine or tiny temple scarcely larger than
the smallest of Japanese shops, yet more of a surprise to me than any of
the larger sacred edifices already visited. For, on either side of the
entrance, stand two monster-figures, nude, blood-red, demoniac,
fearfully muscled, with feet like lions, and hands brandishing gilded
thunderbolts, and eyes of delirious fury; the guardians of holy things,
the Ni-O, or "Two Kings." [4] And right between these crimson monsters
a young girl stands looking at us; her slight figure, in robe of silver
grey and girdle of iris-violet, relieved deliciously against the
twilight darkness of the interior. Her face, impassive and curiously
delicate, would charm wherever seen; but here, by strange contrast with
the frightful grotesqueries on either side of her, it produces an effect
unimaginable. Then I find myself wondering whether my feeling of
repulsion toward those twin monstrosities be altogether lust, seeing
that so charming a maiden deems them worthy of veneration. And they even
cease to seem ugly as I watch her standing there between them, dainty
and slender as some splendid moth, and always naively gazing at the
foreigner, utterly unconscious that they might have seemed to him both
unholy and uncomely.

What are they? Artistically they are Buddhist transformations of Brahma