Temple Echos

You hear the place before you smell it, and then you cannot tell the two apart.

The gate is unlocked, which you were not expecting. Inside, cypress: resinous, dry, slightly bitter, the air of a grove that has stood on the same hill for centuries and has no interest in your arrival. You walk between the trunks. Cedarwood comes in underfoot and overhead at once, pencil-shaving clean, warm without being sweet, the smell of beams cut and joined by hands long gone. Somewhere ahead a fire has burned out. Cypriol, the smoky root the perfumers of India call nagarmotha, lifts from the stones, dark, earthy, faintly leathery, with a thread of something almost like incense that seems to follow you rather than the other way round. You stop to listen. There is no one here. The echo you hear, you realise, is the smell of the place remembering every person who has stood exactly where you are standing.