Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/64

 of the temple. Only now it occurred to him that he should have asked the old man to bring him a lantern; but when at length he found the way he saw that it would have been superfluous. For through the bushes and the bamboo there beckoned a flickering, uncanny light, hung in the temple court-yard. He took down the lantern, and looking neither to the left nor to the right, made directly for the main altar. His steps had been muffled by grass when he was crossing the yard; but although he had on straw sandals, just as soon as he reached the wooden stairs he heard his hollow footfalls reverberating in all the nooks and crannies of the court and temple. The staircase was old and warped, and crackled with a hundred strange voices and whispers; it seemed as if from everywhere malicious imps were snickering at him. Even the pillars moaned as if warningly, and it would not have taken an unusually experienced to discern at once that this was in truth a haunted temple. But the knight knew no fear and did no stop; for that matter, his thoughts were only partly aware of his surroundings, being mostly somewhere in the past, twenty years distant. »And the new abbot came here twenty years, ago,« he whispered absently. »How strange, how very strange!«

He entered the temple and sat down directly beneath the altar, on which a bedusted Shaka Muni, with his hand raised in blessing, reposed on a lotos flower. A thousand cobwebs were hung all around, even on the smile of the dreaming Buddha; they were extended in many layers, one above the other, and from below it looked as if clouds had congealed above the ’s head in the dusk of the eaves. But whereas the cobwebs entwining the saint differed in no respect from the product of ordinary spiders, the silky tissue of the net everywhere else in the temple was iridescent with magnificently glittering hues.

»Only a good spider dares to approach Shaka Muni, who is supreme good,« the said to himself. »It is easy to see that the rest of the cobwebs are the vain work of the Goblin Spider.«

And because he knew that in the beauty of evil only evil again is hidden, he turned aside his gaze from the pearly shimmer of those phantom cobwebs and cast his eyes on the floor, thinking good and clean thoughts. And the resplendent, vividly colored cobwebs vanished.

He was satisfied with himself when he noted this but further he saw nothing out of the ordinary, nor did he hear any suspicious sound; not until midnight. Then suddenly there appeared before him a specter having only half a face, one eye, one hand, one foot, and flowing hair that was naught but a tangled cobweb. And when