The Decay of the Angel - Yukio Mishima

Honda. He must pretend to hope. The sacrificial kid in
India had gone on struggling for so long after its head
had fallen.
The eye of the troublesome supervisor no longer
upon him, Honda leaned on his stick and reeled
extravagantly as he made his way up the slope. He
began to feel as if he were being funny. The pain left
him and his step was brisker.
The smell of summer grasses filled the air. Pines
were thick along the road. Leaning on his stick, he
looked up at the sky. In the strong sunlight the cones
among the thick branches were etched scale by
scale. He came to an abandoned tea patch on the
left, matted with spider webs and creepers.
There were strips of shadow ahead. The nearer
ones were like the slats of a damaged blind, the
farther ones were richly black, gathered in threes and
fours, like sashes for mourning weeds.
A large pine cone lay fallen on the road. On the
pretext of picking it up, he sat down on a giant pine
root. His stomach was heavily, painfully hot. The
fatigue, unable to find an outlet, bent like a rusty wire.
As he toyed with the cone, fully opened and dried, the
tea-colored scales put up a powerful resistance to his
fingers. Dew-flowers dotted the way, their blossoms
wilting in the sun, delicate traces of greenish lavender