Soon we reached our goal, where I was fated to meet and be enslaved by the charms of Hyacinth—for so Mousmé was called. Above us, an inky mass against an indigo sky starred with points of light, rose the mountain, tree-clad, as I knew, on whose sides gleamed here and there the beams of light emanating from paper lanterns or paper-shuttered casements, marking the presence of houses or huts deep-set among the fantastic greenery of the woods.
“Will the sir get out?” exclaimed my _djin_ respectfully, panting with the exertion of the ascent. I climbed down into the darkness, almost falling over Kotmasu, who had already alighted, laughing at our adventure.
Beside us, just where our _rikishas_ had drawn up, was the ghostly gateway marking the entrance to the tea-garden, which lay at the top of a narrow path sloping upward; this wooden gateway painted Indian red and white, the white timbers showing like some spectral skeleton in the dusky gloom.
“Up there, sir,” pointed my _djin_, who bowed low whilst acting as spokesman.
Telling them not to wait, because we should, as Kotmasu put it, “be many hours,” we two entered the gateway, which marked the line of the palings of bamboo, and made our way up the narrow flower-bordered path to the _chaya_.
Through an avenue of sweet odours we walked, the mingled scent of tea-roses, gardenias and the soil making the atmosphere almost cloying with sweetness.
This wonderful garden of the tea-house, with its miniature ponds, bridges and grottoes, now all hidden in the darkness, was mysterious and even uncanny as all Eastern gardens are at dusk.
Set back a little from the path were serried ranks of sentinel-like sunflowers, of whose black, vacant faces, yellow-fringed, I felt conscious, staring at me out of the gloom.
A turn of the path and we were in a fairyland, whose existence none a hundred yards off would have suspected. Light for darkness; sounds in the place of silence.
We made our way beneath the paper lanterns of many hues, suspended in mid-air by slender, undistinguishable cords: dragons, green, yellow or red, as their bellying background of variegated paper demanded or the taste of the artist dictated, are there; and cats, monstrous and eccentric-limbed, such as provoke memories of such things drawn on slates in childhood’s days.