Page:My Japanese Wife.djvu/23

Rh 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