wood, rudely wrought and rudely coloured: still the placid face has
beauty of suggestion.

Crossing the court to the left of the building, I find another flight of
steps before me, leading up a slope to something mysterious still
higher, among enormous trees. I ascend these steps also, reach the top,
guarded by two small symbolic lions, and suddenly find myself in cool
shadow, and startled by a spectacle totally unfamiliar.

Dark--almost black--soil and the shadowing of trees immemorially old,
through whose vaulted foliage the sunlight leaks thinly down in rare
flecks; a crepuscular light, tender and solemn, revealing the weirdest
host of unfamiliar shapes--a vast congregation of grey, columnar, mossy
things, stony, monumental, sculptured with Chinese ideographs. And about
them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a
marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with
similar fantastic lettering, pierce the green gloom by thousands, by
tens of thousands.

And before I can note other details, I know that I am in a hakaba, a
cemetery--a very ancient Buddhist cemetery.

These laths are called in the Japanese tongue sotoba. [1] All have
notches cut upon their edges on both sides near the top-five notches;
and all are painted with Chinese characters on both faces. One
inscription is always the phrase 'To promote Buddhahood,' painted
immediately below the dead man's name; the inscription upon the other
surface is always a sentence in Sanscrit whose meaning has been
forgotten even by those priests who perform the funeral rites. One such
lath is planted behind the tomb as soon as the monument (haka) is set