Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/157

Rh in Ryōbu pictures; a grading in greatness which says something about the Shintō ancestry of the act.

After the priest had duly hung up this happy family portrait and arranged the altar and incense pyre, he went and bathed, returning clothed in his Ontaké pilgrim robe, the very one in which he had himself several times made the ascent of the mountain, and which was therefore correspondingly pure. It showed this unmistakably. I think it was perhaps the dirtiest garment I have ever seen; at all events it was the most self-evidently so. It convinced at once of holiness in spite of the fact that it fortunately lacked all odor of sanctity. For it was internally as clean as externally it was dirty; it being, as we have seen, as imperative upon a palmer to wash himself as it is not to wash his robe.

Through the garment's present grimy gray glimmered traces of red characters; the stamped certificates, these, of his ascents. Their glory, enhanced by being hidden in an ideographic tongue, shone all the more resplendent for being thus mellowed by travelstain. It was a pious thought that induced the wearer later to let his mantle fall, in