It had been raining. Such torrents of rain! Kotmasu had come up to see us through it all. A queer figure in an out-of-date English mackintosh, the rubber as well as the style of which, he had admitted under pressure of my chaff, had perished, and a wonderful umbrella-like hat of huge diameter.
Down all the mountain-paths, and the steep roads leading into the town, the miniature torrents ran, as if they must sweep away the very foundations of the frail, queer-looking houses.
The harbour was blotted out, the town obscured by the vast grey masses of cloud, which, topping the hills they hid, seemed to fall down their sides into the hollow of the town.
Mousmé and I, till Kotmasu came, had watched the scene from the verandah, waiting for the rifts in the watery veil which, sure to come sooner or later, would give us exquisite peeps of indescribable loveliness.
Now all three of us are standing there in all the silver glory of Japanese moonlight.
Kotmasu even is silent, and makes no further attempt to explain English ways and customs to Mousmé.
The hillside, with its drenched foliage and grassy slopes, is like a sheet of frosted silver. In the foreground lies our garden set thick with Nature’s flashing, gem-like rain-drops. The harbour can be seen again, as usual, an immense black pearl of irregular shape, with here and there a streak of moonlight pencilled on its tranquil surface. The cemeteries and tea-fields stretched below us to the right and left are but darker oxidised silver; the temples and tea-houses but embossed figures.
Down quite below us is the still darker patch of colouring, immense, far-spreading, which marks the town; the lights and the gleam of lanterns look in the damp air like angry eyes seen in tears.
Few sounds reach us, and even the cicala’s chirp is far less noisy than usual. Mousmé still has hold of my hand, and I can see her face glancing upward now and then.
We might have remained there on the verandah with the light of the room behind us streaming out, a warm yellow patch, for another hour or two, so impressive was the view, and the silence which all three of us seemed so reluctant to break. But suddenly we are startled by the _Boom! Boom—m—m!_ of the immense gong belonging to the Shinto monastery far below us down the mountain side. Such a noise!—awe-inspiring, terrific (if there be tone colours, then red, purple and orange), invading every hillside cranny, seeming positively to engulf us in its ever-widening air circles of sound.