Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/24

 roof-tree are wrapped in finely chased and richly gilt copper. Before and behind the shrine stand torii of rose-red lacquer; a balustrade of the same colour encircles it, and on the roof perches a golden phnix with outspread wings. The effigy of the deity is placed within this shrine in sacred seclusion, and to fifty men wearing sacerdotal vestments the duty of bearing the mikoshi is entrusted. But there is a difference in the people's treatment of their own special guests. These are not enclosed in the gloom of a shrine: they are mounted on high, overlooking the multitude of merry-makers and looked up to by them, and they ride each on a "car of gentle motion" (nerimono or dashi), a magnificent and colossal affair, its dimensions and gorgeousness affording a measure of the piety and prosperity of the parish. Described in simplest outline, the dashi is a rectangular wooden house mounted on a four-wheeled wagon. As for its details, they defy description. From sill to eaves it is a mass of elaborate carving and rich decoration. Brilliant brocades, portly silk tassels, snow-white go-hei and wreaths of gold-and-silver flowers fill the intervals between deeply chiselled diapers, flights of phnixes, processions of tortoises, and lines of dragons. Immediately under the roof, and thus raised some fifteen feet above the street, a broad platform affords space for fifty or sixty people, and springing from pyramidal drapery at the centre of the artistically carved ridge-pole, a tapering