But did Khashoji really faint when he was thrown from his horse? It is true that he had been unconscious of any pain from his wounded neck, and he distinctly remembered lying helpless on the muddy bank of a lonely river, smeared from head to foot with mud and blood. As he lay there he gazed up into a clear blue sky, and across his vision a few branches of willows waved to and fro.
How densely blue the sky seemed to him compared with any he had ever looked at hitherto! It appeared as if he were peering from below into a gigantic, inverted jar of indigo. At the bottom of the jar, clouds like gathering foam were drifting, and as fast as they came they disappeared again behind the quivering leaves of the willows.
So was it possible that Khashoji had been unconscious? Between his eyes and the blue sky, however, floated many curious things like shadows, things that did not exist at all, but merely visions of his fevered brain. First there appeared the old skirt which his mother used to wear. When he had been a child, how often he had clung to it in joy or sorrow! Poor Khashoji stretched out his hands to grasp it, but it at once eluded him. It flapped like transparent silk-gauze, allowing the drifting banks of clouds to be seen through its folds like glittering mica, and then it disappeared altogether.
Then behind that gauzy film appeared the same vast fields of sesame which had grown at the rear of his house—the sesame fields, which in midsummer were dotted with delicate, pale flowers. He tried hard to see if he and his brothers were playing there, but there was no sign of a human being. He could only see the ghastly, pale flowers and leaves of the sesame basking in a dim sunshine, and soon they also vanished into the blue of the sky.