Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/248

 lightens the general austerity of the conception. Sobu, watching his sacred geese, looks as though he were himself on the verge of cackling; Chokoro, liberating his magic horse from a monster gourd, seems astounded at his own achievement; Gama, with his toad warlock, is sufficiently dirty, distraught, and unkempt to suit such companionship; Tekkai, as he blows his soul into space, presents an inane aspect quite in character with the myth that he forgot to provide for the safety of his body during the wanderings of his spirit, and thus had to be ultimately content with the buried corpse of a beggar; Roko balances himself on his flying tortoise with the air of a decrepit acrobat; and Kumê, who fell from his cloud-chariot because his carnal desires were revived by the sight of a beautiful girl's image mirrored in a stream, has a wavering mien suggestive of some such catastrophe. The mountain genii of Japan never meddled with earthly affairs or placed their supernatural powers at the disposal of human beings, whereas the tengu, as shown above, were much more accommodating.

People to whose imagination the unknown fate of a hermit or the fanaticism of an ascetic presented such a mine of vivid myths, did not fail to find weird explanation of the ignis fatuus. It was a ghost-fire (in-kwa), a demon-light (oni-bi), a fox-flame (kitsune-bi), a flash-pillar (hito-bashira), a badger-blaze (tanuki-bi), a dragon-torch (riu-to), a lamp of Buddha (Butsu-to), and so forth. Here