[9] The gentry, the old Samurai, however, still constitute the governing class to-day apparently, and the aristocratic spirit stands in the way of indiscriminate rise of the plebeians.
We came into Kioto from Osaka, by rail, one fine afternoon. I had a half-childish hope of being surprised, a memory of days when, a boy, I read of the great forbidden city. Only a few years ago it was still forbidden, and now the little respectable car was hurrying us there as prosily as older life translates the verse of our early dreams. We were in September heat and glare. We passed over wide spaces of plain, edged by sharp mountains, looking hot and barren; through great plantations and stretches of green, with here and there a temple half hidden,--and over dried river-beds.
The station closed all views on our arrival, and the sudden transfer to streets showing no European influences was as if we had passed through a city's walls.
The first sensation was merely the usual one of a whirl through innumerable buildings, low, of wood, and more or less the same; extremely wide streets, all very clean; many people; a great bridge across the stony bed of a river almost dry; then some trees and little gardens and corners of temples with heavy roofs, as we turned through little roads and drove up to the gate of the hotel inclosure, which is placed on the edge of the outside hills and looks down upon Kioto. We were high up, in rooms, looking over trees just below; next to us the corner of temple grounds that rounded away out of sight.
Early on most mornings I have sat out on our wide veranda and drawn or painted from the great panorama before me--the distant mountains making a great wall lighted up clearly, with patches of burning yellow and white and green, against the western sky. The city lies in fog, sometimes cool and gray; sometimes golden and smoky. The tops of pagodas and heavy roofs of temples lift out of this sea, and through it shine innumerable little white spots of the plastered sides of houses. Great avenues, which divide the city in parallel lines, run off into haze; far away always shines the white wall of the city castle; near us, trees and houses and temples drop out occasionally from the great violet shadows cast by the mountain behind us. Before the city wakes and the air clears, the crows fly from near the temples toward us, as the great bell of the temple sounds, and we hear the call of the gongs and indefinite waves of prayer. Occasionally a hawk rests uneasily on the thin branches below. Then the sun eats up the shadows, and the vast view unites in a great space of plain behind the monotony of the repeated forms of the small houses, broken by the shoulders of the roofs and pagodas of many temples. But near us are many trees and tea-houses and gardens, and we are as if in the country.