Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/40

 burning in the Grecian prytaneum two thousand years ago, so at the national shrines in Izumo and Ise there are stone lanterns in which the flame is said to have glowed uninterruptedly since the age of the gods. If that be so, it is a flame twenty-five centuries old. The origin of the fire-guarding cult is now so well understood, and its practice has been traced to so many races, that to find it in Japan also is neither surprising nor specially significant. But, as might have been anticipated, some of the rites connected with it reflect the peculiar genius of the Japanese. In Kyōtō, on the last evening of the year, when the street leading to the temple of Gion is converted into a market for the sale of New Year's decorations, and is crowded with people of all degrees, men go about carrying short hempen ropes with one end burning. These they swing around their heads, and it is the privilege of any person struck by a rope to revile the bearer without stint. The Japanese language is not furnished with curses after the pattern of Occidental blasphemies, but it lends itself to the construction of very pregnant invective, and no one that has waited in Gionmachi to see the death of the old year, can labour under any doubt of the Kyōtō people's capacity for objurgation. But it is all perfectly good-humoured; a mutual measuring of abusive vocabularies. Meanwhile a big bonfire burns within the precincts of the shrine. It has been kindled from a year-old flame tended in a lamp