But it was she who comforted, whispering words that she knew were empty, caressing the younger girl with a touch that held no tremor, no hint of those anguished visions that had floated through the leaden silences of her soul.
Till at last, Patricia, half-reassured, smiled and fell asleep; while Barbara, her loose gold hair drifting across the pillow, her bare arm nestling the dark, braided head beside her, lay stirless, staring into the shadows, where the pale glimmer of the Buddha floated, a ghostly _chiaroscuro_.
Nikko's thin street, with its gigantic isle of cryptomeria, was a shimmer of gold, a flicker of crimson and mandarin-blue. All the town was out of doors, for it was the _matsuri_, the local festival of Ieyasu, the great _shogun_ deity, when the ancient furniture and treasures of the temple are carried in priestly processional through the streets. The path of the pageant was lined with spectators: old country-women with shaven eyebrows and burnished, blackened teeth, and with hair tightly plastered in old-fashioned wheels and pinions; children in kaleidoscopic dress, frantically dragged by older girls with pink paper flowers in their stiff black hair; men sitting sedately on sober-colored _f'ton_, bowing to pedestrian acquaintances with elaborate and stereotyped ceremony. In the moldy shade above a grim, wizened row of images of the god of justice, was nailed a sign-board: "Everybody are require not to broke the trees." Beside the moss-covered replicas a booth had been erected for foreign spectators. It was crowded with tourists--a bank of perspiring, fan-fluttering humanity. Up and down trudged post-card sellers, and _saké_ bearers with trays of shallow, lacquer cups. The air shimmered with a fine white dust from the thousands of wooden clogs, and the trees were sibilant with the tumult of the _semi_.
The procession seemed interminable. Priests rode on horseback, clothed in black gauze robes with stoles of gold brocade and queer, winged hats. Acolytes marched afoot in green or yellow with stoles of black, like huge parti-colored beetles. Groups of bearers in white _houri_ carried brass altar furniture, great drums fantastically painted, ancient chain-armor and tall banners of every tint. The center of interest was a sacred _mikoshi_, or palanquin, holding the divine symbols, elaborately carved and gold-lacquered, borne by sixty men in white, with cloths of like hue bound turban-wise about their foreheads. Around these circled drum-beaters and pipe-players, making an indescribable medley of sounds. The god entered into his devotees. The palanquin tossed like the waves of the sea. The bearers howled and chanted gutturally. Sweat poured from their faces. Some of them smiled and danced as they staggered on under the immense bearing-poles.