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+****The Project Gutenberg Etext of Noto, by Percival Lowell****
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+Title:  Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan
+
+Author:  Percival Lowell
+
+April, 2001  [Etext #2605]
+
+
+****The Project Gutenberg Etext of Noto, by Percival Lowell****
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+Scanned and typed by Eric Hutton (bookman@rmplc.co.uk)
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+
+Noto, an unexplored corner of Japan
+
+by Percival Lowell
+
+
+
+
+From you, my dear Basil, the confidant of my hopes toward Noto, I
+know I may look for sympathy now that my advances have met with such
+happy issue, however incomplete be my account.  And so I ask you to
+be my best man in the matter before the world.
+
+Ever yours,
+Percival Lowell.
+
+Basil Hall Chamberlain, Esq.
+
+
+
+
+Contents.
+
+    I.  An Unknown.
+   II.  Off and On.
+  III.  The Usui Pass.
+   IV.  Zenkoji.
+    V.  No.
+   VI.  On a New Cornice Road.
+  VII.  Oya Shiradzu, Ko Shiradzu.
+ VIII.  Across the Etchiu Delta.
+   IX.  Over the Arayama Pass.
+    X.  An Inland Sea.
+   XI.  Anamidzu.
+  XII.  At Sea Again.
+ XIII.  On the Noto Highway.
+  XIV.  The Harinoki Toge.
+   XV.  Toward the Pass.
+  XVI.  Riuzanjita.
+ XVII.  Over the Snow.
+XVIII.  A Genial Inkyo.
+  XIX.  Our Passport and the Basha.
+   XX.  Down the Tenriugawa.
+  XXI.  To the Sea.
+
+
+
+
+NOTO: an unexplored corner of Japan.
+
+
+
+I.  An Unknown.
+
+The fancy took me to go to Noto.
+
+It seemed a strange fancy to my friends.
+
+Yet I make no apology for it; for it was a case of love at first sight.
+
+Scanning, one evening, in Tokyo, the map of Japan, in a vague, itinerary
+way, with the look one first gives to the crowd of faces in a ballroom,
+my eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic
+mystery from the western coast.  It made a striking figure there,
+with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands.  Its name, it
+appeared, was Noto; and the name too pleased me.  I liked its vowel
+color; I liked its consonant form, the liquid n and the decisive t.
+Whimsically, if you please, it suggested both womanliness and will.
+The more I looked the more I longed, until the desire carried me not
+simply off my feet, but on to them.
+
+Nobody seemed to know much about my inamorata.  Indeed, those I asked
+asked me, in their own want of information, why I went, and what
+there was to see: of which questions, the second itself did for
+answer to the first.  Why not in fact have set my heart on going to
+Noto just because it was not known!  Not that it is well to believe
+all the unseen to be much worth the seeing, but that I had an itching
+sole to tread what others had not already effacingly betrodden.
+
+Privately, I was delighted with the general lack of knowledge on the
+subject.  It served admirably to put me in conceit with my choice;
+although I will own I was rather at a loss to account for it, and I
+can only explain it now by the fact that the place was so out of the
+way, and not very unlike others, after all. Being thus candid, I
+ought perhaps to go a step farther and renounce the name.  But, on
+the two great principles that the pursuit is itself the prize and
+that the means justifies the end, I prefer to keep it.  For there was
+much of interest to me by the way; and I cling to the name out of a
+kind of loyalty to my own fancy.  I like to think that Xenophon felt
+as much in his Anabasis, though but one book out of seven deals with
+the going up, the other six being occupied with the getting safely
+away again.  It is not told that Xenophon regretted his adventure.
+Certainly I am not sorry I was wedded to my idea.
+
+To most of my acquaintance Noto was scarcely so much as a name, and
+its local habitation was purely cartographic.  I found but one man
+who had been there, and he had dropped down upon it, by way of harbor,
+from a boat.  Some sympathetic souls, however, went so far toward it
+as to ask where it was.
+
+To the westward of Tokyo, so far west that the setting sun no longer
+seems to lose itself among the mountains, but plunges for good and
+all straight into the shining Nirvana of the sea, a strangely shaped
+promontory makes out from the land.  It is the province of Noto,
+standing alone in peninsular isolation.
+
+It was partly in this position that the fascination lay.  Withdrawn
+from its fellows, with its back to the land, it faced the glory of
+the western sky, as if in virginal vision gazing out upon the deep.
+Doubly withdrawn is it, for that the coast from which it stands apart
+is itself almost unvisited by Europeans,--an out-of-the-world state,
+in marked contrast to the shore bordering the Pacific, which is now a
+curbstone on the great waterway round the earth, and incidentally
+makes a happy parenthesis of promenade for the hasty globe-trotter.
+The form, too, of the peninsula came in for a share in its attraction.
+Its coast line was so coquettishly irregular.  If it turned its back
+on the land, it stretched its hands out to the sea, only to withdraw
+them again the next moment,--a double invitation.  Indeed, there is
+no happier linking of land to water.  The navigator in such parts
+becomes himself a delightfully amphibious creature, at home in both
+elements.  Should he tire of the one, he can always take to the other.
+Besides, such features in a coast suggest a certain clean-cut
+character of profile,--a promise, in Japan at least, rarely unkept.
+
+To reach this topographically charming province, the main island had
+to be crossed at its widest, and, owing to lofty mountain chains,
+much tacking to be done to boot.  Atmospherically the distance is
+even greater than afoot.  Indeed, the change in climate is like a
+change in zone; for the trend of the main island at this point,
+being nearly east and west, gives to the one coast a southerly
+exposure, and to the other a northerly one, while the highest wall of
+peaks in Japan, the Hida-Shinshiu range, shuts off most meteorological
+communication.  Long after Tokyo is basking in spring, the west coast
+still lies buried in deep drifts of snow.
+
+It was my misfortune to go to this out-of-the-way spot alone.  I was
+duly sensible of my commiserable state at times.  Indeed, in those
+strange flashes of dual consciousness when a man sees his own
+condition as if it were another's, I pitied myself right heartily;
+for I hold that travel is like life in this, at least, that a
+congenial companion divides the troubles and doubles the joys.
+To please one's self is so much harder than to be pleased by another;
+and when it comes to doubt and difficulty, there are drawbacks to
+being one's own guide, philosopher, and friend.  The treatment is too
+homoeopathic by half.
+
+An excuse for a companion existed in the person of my Japanese boy,
+or cook.  He had been boy to me years before; and on this return of
+his former master to the land of the enlightened, he had come back to
+his allegiance, promoting himself to the post of cook.  During the
+journey he acted in both capacities indifferently,--in one sense,
+not in the other. In addition to being capable he was willing and of
+great endurance.  Besides, he was passionately fond of travel.
+
+He knew no more about Noto than I, and at times, on the road, he could
+not make out what the country folk said, for the difference in dialect;
+which lack of special qualification much increased his charm as a
+fellow-traveler. He neither spoke nor understood English, of course,
+and surprised me, after surprising himself, on the last day but one
+of our trip, by coming out with the words "all right." His surname,
+appropriately enough, meant mountain-rice-field, and his last name
+--which we should call his first name--was Yejiro, or
+lucky-younger-son.  Besides cooking excellently well, he made paper
+plum blossoms beautifully, and once constructed a string telephone
+out of his own head.  I mention these samples of accomplishment to
+show that he was no mere dabbler in pots and pans.
+
+In addition to his various culinary contrivances we took a large and
+motley stock of canned food, some of his own home-made bread, and a
+bottle of whiskey.  We laid in but a small supply of beer; not that
+I purposed to forego that agreeable beverage, but because, in this
+Europeanized age, it can be got in all the larger towns.  Indeed,
+the beer brewed in Yokohama to-day ranks with the best in the world.
+It is in great demand in Tokyo, while its imported, or professedly
+imported, rivals have freely percolated into the interior, so popular
+with the upper and upper middle classes have malt liquors become.
+Nowadays, when a Japanese thinks to go in for Capuan dissipation
+regardless of expense, he treats himself to a bottle of beer.
+
+These larder-like details are not meant to imply that I made a god of
+my palate, but that otherwise my digestion would have played the
+devil with me.  In Japan, to attempt to live off the country in the
+country is a piece of amateur acting the average European bitterly
+regrets after the play, if not during its performance.  We are not
+inwardly contrived to thrive solely on rice and pickles.
+
+It is best, too, for a journey into the interior, to take with you
+your own bedding; sheets, that is, and blankets.  The bed itself
+Yejiro easily improvised out of innumerable futons, as the quilts
+used at night by the Japanese are called.  A single one is enough for
+a native, but Yejiro, with praiseworthy zeal, made a practice of
+asking for half-a-dozen, which he piled one upon the other in the
+middle of the room.  Each had a perceptible thickness and a rounded
+loglike edge; and when the time came for turning in on top of the
+lot, I was always reminded of the latter end of a Grecian hero,
+the structure looked so like a funeral pyre.  When to the above
+indispensables were added clothes, camera, dry plates, books,
+and sundries, it made a collection of household gods quite appalling
+to consider on the march. I had no idea I owned half so much in the
+world from which it would pain me to be parted.  As my property lay
+spread out for packing, I stared at it aghast.
+
+To transport all these belongings, native ingenuity suggested a thing
+called a yanagigori; several of them, in fact.  Now the construction
+of a kori is elementally ingenious. It consists simply of two wicker
+baskets, of the same shape, but of slightly different size, fitting
+into each other upside down.  The two are then tied together with cord.
+The beauty of the idea lies in its extension; for in proportion as
+the two covers are pulled out or pushed home will the pair hold from
+a maximum capacity of both to a minimum capacity of one.  It is
+possible even to start with more than a maximum, if the contents be
+such as are not given to falling out by the way.  The contrivance is
+simply invaluable when it comes to transporting food; for then, as
+you eat your way down, the obliging covers shrink to meet the vacuum.
+If more than one kori be necessary, an easy step in devices leads to
+a series of graded sizes.  Then all your baskets eventually collapse
+into one.
+
+The last but most important article of all was my passport, which
+carefully described my proposed route, and which Yejiro at once took
+charge of and carried about with him for immediate service; for a
+wise paternal government insisted upon knowing my intentions before
+permitting me to visit the object of my choice.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Off and On.
+
+It was on the day but one before the festival of the fifth moon that
+we set out, or, in English, the third of May; and those emblems of
+good luck, the festival fishes, were already swimming in the air
+above the house eaves, as we scurried through the streets in
+jinrikisha toward the Uyeno railway station.  We had been a little
+behindhand in starting, but by extra exertions on the part of the
+runners we succeeded in reaching the station just in time to be shut
+out by the gatekeeper.  Time having been the one thing worthless in
+old Japan, it was truly sarcastic of fate that we should reach our
+first goal too late.  As if to point chagrin, the train still stood
+in waiting. Remonstrances with the wicket man about the imported
+five-minute regulation, or whatever it was, proved of no avail.
+Not one jot or tittle of the rule would he yield, which perhaps was
+natural, inasmuch as, however we might have managed alone, our
+companions the baskets never could have boarded the train without
+offical help.  The intrinsic merits of the baggage failed, alas,
+to affect its mobility.  Then the train slowly drew out.
+
+To be stopped on the road is the common lot of travelers; but to be
+stopped before one has fairly started is nothing less than to be
+mocked at.  It is best, however, to take such gibes in good part.
+Viewing the situation in this light, the ludicrousness of the
+disconnection struck me so forcibly as very nearly to console me for
+my loss, which was not trifling, since the next train did not leave
+for above three hours; too late to push on beyond Takasaki that night,
+a thing I had most firmly purposed to do.  Here I was, the miserable
+victim of a punctuality my own people had foisted on a land only too
+happy without it!  There was poetic justice in the situation, after all.
+Besides, the course of one's true love should not run too smooth.
+Judicious difficulty whets desire.
+
+There was nothing to turn to on the spot, and I was ashamed to go home.
+Then I opportunely remembered something.
+
+I have always thought we limited our pharmacopoeia.  We prescribe
+pills enough for the body, while we leave the mind to look after itself.
+Why should not the spirit also have its draughts and mixtures,
+properly labeled and dispensed!  For example, angling appears to be a
+strong mental opiate.  I have seen otherwise normal people stupefied
+beyond expression when at the butt of a rod and line. Happening to
+recall this effect, I instantly prescribed for my perturbed state of
+mind a good dose of fishing, to be taken as suited the day.  So I
+betook me down a by-street, where the aerial carp promised the
+thickest, and, selecting a house well placed for a view, asked
+permission to mount upon the roof.  It chanced to be a cast-off
+clothing shop, along whose front some fine, if aged, garments were
+hung to catch the public eye.  The camera and I were inducted up the
+ascent by the owner, while my boots, of course, waited dog-like in
+the porch below.
+
+The city made a spectacle from above.  On all sides superb paper carp
+floated to the breeze, tugging at the strings that held them to the
+poles quite after the manner of the real fish.  One felt as though,
+by accident, he had stepped into some mammoth globe of goldfish.
+The whole sky was alive with them.  Eighty square miles of finny folk
+inside the city, and an untold company without.  The counterfeit
+presentments were from five to ten feet long, and painted to mimic
+life.  The breeze entered at the mouth and passed out somewhat less
+freely at the tail, thus keeping them well bellied and constantly in
+motion.  The way they rose and dove and turned and wriggled was
+worthy of free will.  Indeed, they had every look of spontaneity,
+and lacked only the thing itself to turn the sky into an ocean,
+and Tokyo into a sea bottom with a rockery of roof.  Each fish
+commemorates the birth of a boy during the year.  It would thus be
+possible to take a census of the increase of the male population
+yearly, at the trifling cost of scaling a housetop,--a set of
+statistics not without an eventual value.
+
+While we were strolling back, Yejiro and I, we came, in the way,
+upon another species of fish.  The bait, which was well designed to
+captivate, bade for the moment to exceed even the angler's
+anticipations.  It was a sort of un-Christmas tree with fishing-pole
+branches, from which dangled articulated figures, bodied like men,
+but with heads of foxes, tortoises, and other less likelybeasts,
+--bewitching objects in impossible evolution to a bald-pated
+urchin who stood gazing at it with all his soul.  The peddler sat with
+his eyes riveted on the boy, visions of a possible catch chasing
+themselves through his brain.  I watched him, while the crowd behind
+stared at me.  We made quite a tail of curiosity.  The opiate was
+having its effect; I began to feel soporifically calm.  Then I went
+up to the restaurant in the park and had lunch as quietly as
+possible, in fear of friendly discovery.
+
+Sufficiently punctual passengers being now permitted to board the
+next train, I ensconced myself in a kind of parlor compartment, which,
+fortunately, I continued to have all to myself, and was soon being
+rolled westward across the great Musashi plain, ruminating.  My chief
+quarrel with railway rules is, I am inclined to think, that they
+preach to the public what they fail to practice themselves.  After
+having denied me a paltry five minutes' grace at the station, the
+officials proceeded to lose half an hour on the road in a most
+exasperating manner.  Of course the delay was quite exceptional.
+Such a thing had never happened before, and would not happen
+again--till the next time.  But the phenomenal character of the
+occurrence failed to console me, as it should no doubt have done.
+My delay, too, was exceptional--on this line.  Nor was I properly
+mollified by repeated offers of hard-boiled eggs, cakes, and oranges,
+which certain enterprising peddlers hawked up and down the platforms,
+when we stopped, to a rhythmic chant of their own invention.
+
+The only consolation lay in the memory of what travel over the
+Musashi plain used to be before trains hurried one, or otherwise,
+into the heart of the land.  In those days the journey was done in
+jinrikisha, and a question of days, not hours, it was in the doing,
+--two days' worth of baby carriage, of which the tediousness lay
+neither in the vehicles nor in the way, but in the amount of both.
+Or, if one put comparative speed above comparative comfort, he rose
+before the lark, to be tortured through a summer's day in a basha,
+or horse vehicle, suitable only for disembodied spirits.  My joints
+ached again at the thought. Clearly, to grumble now was to sin
+against proportion.
+
+Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing
+slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring
+freshness of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees
+smothered in blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of
+the clouds above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the
+mountains, each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of
+color, barely to be parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out
+the horizon of field.  Then, slowly, timed to our advance, the tint
+gathered substance, grew into contrasts that, deepening minute by
+minute, resolved into detail, until at last the whole stood revealed
+in all its majesty, foothill, shoulder, peak, one grand chromatic
+rise from green to blue.
+
+One after the other the points came out thus along the southern sky:
+first the summits behind Ome; then Bukosan, like some sentinel,
+half-way up the plain's long side; and then range beyond range
+stretching toward the west.  Behind Bukosan peeped Cloud's Rest, the
+very same outline in fainter tint, so like the double reflection
+from a pane of glass that I had to shift to an open window to make
+sure it was no illusion.  Then the Nikko group began to show on the
+right, and the Haruna mass took form in front; and as they rose
+higher and the sunbeams slanted more, gilding the motes in the heavy
+afternoon air, they rimmed the plain in front into one great bowl
+of fairy eau de vie de Dantzic.  Slowly above them the sun dipped to
+his setting, straight ahead, burnishing our path as we pursued in
+two long lines of flashing rail into the west-northwest.  Lower he
+sank, luring us on, and lower yet, and then suddenly disappeared
+beyond the barrier of peaks.
+
+The train drew up, panting.  It was Takasaki, now steeped in saffron
+afterglow.  The guards passed along, calling out the name and
+unfastening the doors.  Everybody got out and shuffled off on their
+clogs.  The baskets, Yejiro, and I followed, after a little, through
+the gloaming.
+
+It was not far to the inn.  It was just far enough, at that hour, to
+put us in heart for a housing.  Indeed, twilight is the time of
+times to arrive anywhere.  Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems
+homelike then.  The dusk has snatched from you the silent
+companionship of nature, to leave you poignantly alone.  It is the
+hour when a man draws closer to the one he loves, and the hour when
+most he shrinks from himself, though he want another near.   It is
+then the rays of the house lights wander abroad and appear to beckon
+the houseless in; and that must be, in truth, a sorry hostelry to
+seem such to him.
+
+Even Takasaki bore a look of welcome alike to the foreign and the
+native stranger, which was certainly wonderful for Takasaki.  The
+place used not to fancy foreigners, and its inns bandied the European
+traveler about like a bale of undesirable merchandise with the duties
+still due.  But now, what a change!  The innkeeper not only received
+us, but led the way at once to the best room,--a room in the second
+story of the fireproof storehouse at the back, which he hoped would
+be comfortable.  Comfortable!  The room actually proffered us a table
+and chairs.  No one who has not, after a long day's tramp, sought in
+vain to rest his weary body propped up against a side beam in a
+Japanese inn can enter into the feeling a chair inspires, even long
+afterward, by recollection.
+
+I cannot say I loved Takasaki in former days.  Was it my reception or
+was it sentiment that made me see it all now through a mist of glamour?
+Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything.  Few
+things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years.  Indeed,
+sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of
+sentiment?  Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning
+with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people.
+Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no more.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The Usui Pass.
+
+The first object to catch my eye, when the shoji were pushed apart,
+the next morning, was a string of the ubiquitous paper fish, dangling
+limp in the motionless May air from a pole in a neighboring yard;
+highly suggestive of having just been caught for breakfast.  The
+sight would have been painfully prophetic but for the food we had
+brought with us; for, of all meals, a Japanese breakfast is the most
+cold, the most watery, and the most generally fishy in the world.
+As it was, breakfast consisted of pathetic copies of consecrated
+originals.  It might have been excellent but for the canned milk.
+
+No doubt there are persons who are fond of canned milk; but, for my
+part, I loathe it.  The effect of the sweetish glue upon my inner man
+is singularly nauseating.  I have even been driven to drink my
+matutinal coffee in all its after-dinner strength rather than
+adulterate it with the mixture.  You have, it is true, the choice of
+using the stuff as a dubious paste, or of mixing it with water into a
+non-committal wash; and, whichever plan you adopt, you wish you had
+adopted the other.  Why it need be so unpalatably cloying is not
+clear to my mind.  They tell me the sugar is needed to preserve the
+milk.  I never could make out that it preserved anything but the
+sugar. Simply to see the stuff ooze out of the hole in the can is
+deterrent.  It is enough to make one think seriously at times of
+adding a good milch cow to his already ample trip encumberment, at
+the certain cost of delaying the march, and the not improbable chance
+of being taken for an escaped lunatic.  Indeed, to the Japanese mind,
+to be seen solemnly preceding a caravan of cattle for purposes of
+diet would certainly suggest insanity.  For cows in Japan are never
+milked.  Dairy products, consequently, are not to be had on the road,
+and the man who fancies milk, butter, or cheese must take them with
+him.
+
+It used to be the same in Tokyo, but in these latter days a dairy has
+been started at Hakone, which supplies fresh butter to such Tokyoites
+as like it.  One of my friends, who had been many years from home,
+was much taken with the new privilege, and called my attention to it
+with some pride.  The result was a colorless lardy substance that
+looked like poor oleomargarine (not like good oleomargarine, for that
+looks like butter), but which was held in high esteem, nevertheless.
+My friend, indeed, seriously maintained to me once that such was the
+usual color of fresh butter, and insisted that the yellow hue common
+elsewhere must be the result of dyes.  He was so positive on the
+point that he almost persuaded me, until I had left him and reason
+returned.  It took me some time to recover from the pathos of the
+thing: a man so long deprived of that simple luxury that he had quite
+forgotten how it looked, and a set of cows utterly incapable, from
+desuetude, of producing it properly.
+
+After I had duly swallowed as much as I could of the doubtful dose
+supposed to be cafe au lait, the cans were packed up again, and we
+issued from the inn to walk a stone's throw to the train.
+
+Takasaki stands well toward the upper end of the plain, just below
+where the main body of it thrusts its arms out into the hills.
+Up one of these we were soon wending.  Every minute the peaks came
+nearer, frowning at us from their crumbling volcanic crags.  At last
+they closed in completely, standing round about in threatening
+pinnacles, and barring the way in front.  At this, the train,
+contrary to the usual practice of trains in such seemingly impassable
+places, timidly drew up.
+
+In truth, the railway comes to an end at the foot of the Usui toge
+(toge, meaning "pass"), after having wandered up, with more zeal than
+discretion, into a holeless pocket.  Such untimely end was far from
+the original intention; for the line was meant for a through line
+along the Nakasendo from Tokyo to Kioto, and great things were
+expected of it.  But the engineering difficulties at this point, and
+still more at the Wada toge, a little farther on, proving too great,
+the project was abandoned, and the through line built along the
+Tokaido instead.  The idea, however, had got too much headway to be
+stayed.  So it simply jumped the Usui toge, rolled down the Shinano
+valley, climbed another divide, and came out, at last, on the sea of
+Japan.
+
+The hiatus caused by the Usui pass is got over by a horse railroad!
+Somehow, the mere idea seemed comic.  A horse railroad in the heart
+of Japan over a pass a mile high!  To have suddenly come upon the
+entire Comedie Francaise giving performances in a teahouse at the top
+could hardly have been more surprising.  The humor of the thing was
+not a whit lessened by its looks.
+
+To begin with, the cars were fairly natural.  This was a masterly
+stroke in caricature, since it furnished the necessary foil to all
+that followed.  They were not, to my eye, of any known species, but,
+with the exception of being evidently used to hard lines, they looked
+enough like trams to pass as such.  Inside sat, in all seriousness,
+a wonderful cageful of Japanese.  To say that they were not to the
+horse-car born conveys but a feeble notion of their unnaturalness.
+They were propped, rather than seated, bolt upright, with a decorum
+which would have done more than credit to a funeral.  They did not
+smile; they did not even stir, except to screw their heads round to
+stare at me.  They were dummies pure and simple, and may pass for the
+second item in the properties.
+
+The real personnel began with the horses. These were very sorry-looking
+animals, but tough enough admirably to pull through the performance.
+Managing them with some difficulty stood the driver on the front
+platform, arrayed in a bottle-green livery, with a stiff military cap
+which gave him the combined look of a German officer and of a
+musician from a street band.  His energy was spent in making about
+three times as much work for himself as was needed.  On the tail of
+the car rode the guard, also notably appareled, whose importance
+outdid even his uniform.  He had the advantage of the driver in the
+matter of a second-class fish-horn, upon which he tooted vigorously
+whenever he thought of it; and he was not a forgetful man.
+
+Comedie Francaise, indeed!  Why, here it all was in Japanese farce!
+From the passivity of the passengers to the pantomime of the driver
+and guard, it could hardly have been done better; and the actors all
+kept their countenances, too, in such a surprising manner.
+A captious critic might have suggested that they looked a thought too
+much at the audience; but, on the whole, I think that rather added to
+the effect.  At all events, they were excellently good, especially
+the guard, whose consequential airs could not have been happier if
+they had been studied for years.
+
+There was no end of red tape about the company.  Though the cars were
+some time in starting, so that I got well ahead of them, they could
+not admit me on the road, when my baggage kuruma turned out to be too
+slow, because I had not bought a ticket at the office.  So I was
+obliged to continue to tramp afoot, solacing myself with short cuts,
+by which I gained on them, to my satisfaction, and by which I gained
+still more on my own baggage, to my disgust, in that I ceased to be
+near enough to hasten it.
+
+I had to wait for the latter at the parting of the ways; for the tram
+had a brand-new serpentine track laid out for it, while the old trail
+at this point struck up to the right, coming out eventually at a
+shrine that crowned the summit of the pass.  Horse-railroads not
+being as new to me as to the Japanese, I piously chose the narrow way
+leading to the temple, to the lingering regret of the baggage
+trundlers, who turned sorry eyes down upon the easier secular road at
+every bend in our own.
+
+A Japanese pass has one feature which is invariable: it is always
+longer than you think it is going to be.  I can, of my own
+experience, recall but two exceptions to this distressing family
+likeness, both of which were occasions of company which no doubt
+forbade proper appreciation of their length, and vitiates them as
+scientific observations.  When toiling up a toge I have been tempted
+to impute acute ascentomania to the Japanese mind, but sober second
+thought has attributed this inference to an overheated imagination.
+It seems necessary, therefore, to lay the blame on the land, which,
+like some people, is deceptive from very excess of uprightness.
+There is so much more soil than can possibly be got in by simple
+directness of purpose, or even by one, more or less respectable,
+slope.
+
+It was cold enough at the summit to cool anything, imaginary or
+otherwise.  Even devotion shivered, as, in duty bound, it admired the
+venerable temple and its yet more venerable tree.  The roofs of the
+chalets stood weighted with rocks to keep them there, and the tree,
+raised aloft on its stone-girded parapet, stretched bare branches
+imploringly toward the sky.  So much for being a mile or so nearer
+heaven, while still of the earth and earthy.
+
+Half-way down the descent, Asamayama came out from behind the brow of
+a hill, sending his whiffs of smoke dreamily into the air; and a
+little lower still, beyond a projecting spur on the opposite side,
+the train appeared, waiting in the plain, with its engine puffing a
+sort of antiphonal response.  The station stood at the foot of the
+tramway, which tumbled to it after the manner of a cascade over what
+looked to be a much lower pass, thus apparently supporting the theory
+of "supererogatory climb." The baggage passed on, and Yejiro and I
+followed leisurely, admiring the view.
+
+Either the old trail failed to connect with the railway terminus,
+which I suspect, or else we missed the path, for we had to supply a
+link ourselves.  This resulted in a woefully bad cut across a
+something between a moor and a bog, supposed to be drained by
+ditches, most of which lay at right angles to our course.  We were
+not much helped, half-way over, by a kindly intentioned porter, who
+dawned upon us suddenly in the distance, rushing excitedly out from
+behind the platform, gesticulating in a startling way and shouting
+that time was up.  We made what sorry speed was possible under the
+circumstances, getting very hot from exertion, and hotter still from
+anxiety, and then waited impatiently ten good minutes in our seats in
+the railway carriage for the train to start.  I forget whether I
+tipped that well-meaning but misguided man.
+
+The tram contingent had already arrived,--had in fact finished
+feeding at the many mushroom teahouses gathered about the station,--
+and were now busy finding themselves seats.  Their bustle was most
+pleasing to witness, till suddenly I discovered that there were no
+first-class carriages; that it was my seat, so to speak, for which
+they were scrambling.  The choice, it appeared, began with
+second-class coaches, doomed therefore to be doubly popular.
+Second-class accommodation, by no means merely nominal, was evidently
+the height of luxury to the patrons of the country half of this
+disjointed line, which starts so seductively from Tokyo.  Greater
+comfort is strictly confined to the more metropolitan portion.
+
+The second-class coaches had of course the merit of being cheaper,
+but this was more than offset by the fact that in place of panes of
+glass their windows had slats of wood with white cotton stretched
+over them,--an ingenious contrivance for shutting out the view and a
+good bit of the light, both of which are pleasing, and for letting in
+the cold, which is not.
+
+"If you go with the crowd, you will be taken care of," as a shrewd
+financier of my acquaintance used to say about stocks.  This occurred
+to me by way of consolation, as the guard locked us into the carriage,
+in the approved paternal government style.  Fortunately the
+locking-in was more apparent than real, for it consisted solely in
+the turning of a bar, which it was quite possible to unturn, as all
+travelers in railway coaches are aware, by dropping the window into
+its oubliette and stretching the arm well down outside,--a trick of
+which I did not scruple to avail myself.  My fellow-passengers the
+Japanese were far too decorous to attempt anything of the kind, which
+compelled me to do so surreptitiously, like one who committeth a crime.
+
+These fellow-passengers fully made up for the room they took by their
+value as scientific specimens.  I would willingly have chloroformed
+them all, and presented them on pins to some sartorial museum;
+for each typified a stage in a certain unique process of evolution,
+at present the Japanese craze.  They were just so many samples of
+unnatural development in dress, from the native Japanese to the
+imitated European.  The costume usually began with a pot-hat and
+ended in extreme cases with congress boots.  But each man exhibited a
+various phase of it according to his self-emancipation from former
+etiquette.  Sometimes a most disreputable Derby, painfully
+reminiscent of better bygone days, found itself in company with a
+refined kimono and a spotless cloven sock.  Sometimes the metamorphosis
+embraced the body, and even extended down the legs, but had not yet
+attacked the feet, in its creeping paralysis of imitation.  In another
+corner, a collarless, cravatless semiflannel shirt had taken the
+place of the under tunic, to the worse than loss of looks of its
+wearer.  Opposite this type sat the supreme variety which evidently
+prided itself upon its height of fashion.  In him the change had gone
+so far as to recall the East End rough all over, an illusion
+dispelled only by the innocence of his face.
+
+While still busy pigeonholing my specimens, I chanced to look through
+the open window, and suddenly saw pass by, as in the shifting background
+of some scenic play, the lichenveiled stone walls and lotus-mantled
+moats of the old feudal castle of Uyeda.  Poor, neglected, despised
+bit of days gone by!--days that are but yesterdays, aeons since as
+measured here.  Already it was disappearing down the long perspective
+of the past; and yet only twenty years before it had stood in all the
+pride and glory of the Middle Ages.  Then it had been
+
+    A daimyo's castle, wont of old to wield
+    Across the checkerboard of paddyfield
+    A rook-like power from its vantage square
+    On pawns of hamlets; now a ruin, there,
+    Its triple battlements gaze grimly down
+    Upon a new-begotten bustling town,
+    Only to see self-mirrored in their moat
+    An ivied image where the lotus float.
+
+Some subtle sense of fitness within me was touched as it might have
+been a nerve; and instantly the motley crew inside the car became not
+merely comic, but shocking.  It seemed unseemly, this shuffling off
+the stage of the tragic old by the farce-like new.  However little
+one may mourn the dead, something forbids a harlequinade over their
+graves.  The very principle of cosmic continuity has a decency about
+it.  Nature holds with one hand to the past even as she grasps at the
+future with the other.  Some religions consecrate by the laying on of
+hands; Nature never withdraws her touch.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Zenkoji.
+
+We were now come more than half-way from sea to sea, and we were
+still in the thick of Europeanization.  So far we had traveled in the
+track of the comic.  For if Japan seems odd for what it is, it seems
+odder for what it is no longer.
+
+One of the things which imitation of Western ways is annihilating is
+distance.  Japan, like the rest of the world, is shrinking.  This was
+strikingly brought home that afternoon. A few short hours of shifting
+panorama, a varying foreground of valley that narrowed or widened
+like the flow of the stream that had made it, peaks that opened and
+shut on one another like the changing flies in some spectacular play,
+and we had compassed two days' worth of old-time travel when a man
+made every foot of ground his own, and were drawing near Zenkoji.
+
+I was glad to be there; hardly as glad to be there so soon.
+There are lands made to be skimmed, tame samenesses of plain or weary
+wastes of desert, where even the iron horse gallops too slow.  Japan
+is not one of them.  A land which Nature herself has already crumpled
+into its smallest compass, and then covered with vegetation rich as
+velvet, is no land to hurry over.  One may well linger where each
+mile builds the scenery afresh. And in this world, whose civilization
+grows at the expense of the picturesque, it is something to see a
+culture that knows how least to mar.
+
+Upon this mood of unsatisfied satisfaction my night fell, and shortly
+after the train rolled into the Zenkoji station, amid a darkness
+deepened by falling rain.  The passengers bundled out.  The station
+looked cheerless enough.  But from across the open space in front
+shone a galaxy of light.  A crowd of tea-houses posted on the farther
+side had garlanded themselves all over with lanterns, each trying to
+outvie its neighbor in apparent hospitality.  The display was
+perceptibly of pecuniary intent; but still it was grateful.  To be
+thought worth catching partakes, after all, of the nature of a
+compliment.  What was not so gratifying was the embarrassment of
+choice that followed; for each of these gayly beckoning caravansaries
+proved to be a catch-pilgrim for its inn up-town.  Being on a hill,
+Zenkoji is not by way of easy approach by train; and the pilgrims to
+it are legion.  In order, therefore, to anticipate the patronage of
+unworthy rivals, each inn has felt obliged to be personally
+represented on the spot.
+
+The one for which mine host of Takasaki had, with his blessing,
+made me a note turned out so poorly prefaced that I hesitated.
+The extreme zeal on the part of its proprietor to book me made me still
+more doubtful.  So, sending Yejiro off to scout, I walked to and fro,
+waiting.  I did not dare sit down on the sill of any of the booths,
+for fear of committing myself.
+
+While he was still away searching vainly for the proper inn, the
+lights were suddenly all put out.  At the same fatal moment the
+jinrikisha, of which a minute before there had seemed to be plenty,
+all mysteriously vanished.  By one fell stroke there was no longer
+either end in sight nor visible means of reaching it.
+
+    "In the street of by and by
+     Stands the hostelry of never,"
+
+as a rondel of Henley's hath it; but not every one has the chance to
+see the Spanish proverb so literally fulfilled.  There we were--nowhere.
+I think I never suffered a bitterer change of mood in my life.
+
+At last, after some painful groping in the dark, and repeated resolves
+to proceed on foot to the town and summon help, I chanced to stumble
+upon a stray kuruma, which had incautiously returned, under cover of
+the darkness, to the scene of its earlier exploits.  I secured it on
+the spot, and by it was trundled across a bit of the plain and up the
+long hill crowned by the town, to the pleasing jingle of a chime of
+rings hung somewhere out of sight beneath the body of the vehicle.
+When the trundler asked where to drop me, I gave at a venture the
+name that sounded the best, only to be sure of having guessed awry
+when he drew up before the inn it designated.  The existence of a
+better was legible on the face of it.  We pushed on.
+
+Happily the hostelries were mostly in one quarter, the better to keep
+an eye on one another; for in the course of the next ten minutes I
+suppose we visited nearly every inn in the place.  The choice was not
+a whit furthered by the change from the outposts to the originals.
+At last, however, I got so far in decision as to pull off my boots,
+--an act elsewhere as well, I believe, considered an acquiescence in
+fate,--and suffered myself to be led through the house, along the
+indoor piazza of polished board exceeding slippery, up several
+breakneck, ladder-like stairways even more polished and frictionless,
+round some corners dark as a dim andon (a feeble tallow candle
+blinded by a paper box), placed so as not to light the turn, could
+make them, until finally we emerged on the third story, a height that
+itself spoke for the superiority of the inn, and I was ushered into
+what my bewildered fancy instantly pictured a mediaeval banqueting
+hall.  It conjured up the idea on what I must own to have been
+insufficient grounds, namely, a plain deal table and a set of
+questionably made, though rather gaudily upholstered chairs.
+But chairs, in a land whose people have from time immemorial found
+their own feet quite good enough to sit on, were so unexpected a
+luxury, even after our Takasaki experience, that they may be pardoned
+for suggesting any flight of fancy.
+
+The same might formerly have been said of the illumination next
+introduced.  Now, however, common kerosene lamps are no longer so
+much of a sight even in Japan.  Indeed, I had the assurance to ask
+for a shade to go with the one they set on the table in all the glaring
+nudity of a plain chimney.  This there was some difficulty in finding,
+the search resulting in a green paper visor much too small, that sat
+on askew just far enough not to hide the light.  The Japanese called
+it a hat, without the least intention of humor.
+
+By the light thus given the room stood revealed, an eyrie, encased on
+all sides except the one of approach by shoji only.  Into these had
+been let a belt of glass eighteen inches wide all the way round the
+room, at the height at which a person sitting on the mats could see
+out.  It is much the fashion now thus to graft a Western window upon
+a Far-Eastern wall.  The idea is ingenious and economical, and has but
+two drawbacks,--that you feel excessively indoors if you stand up,
+and strangely out-of-doors if you sit down.
+
+I pushed the panels apart, and stepped out upon the narrow balcony.
+Below me lay the street, the lanterns of the passers-by flitting like
+fireflies through the dark; and from it stole up to me the hum of
+pleasure life, a perfume of sound, strangely distinct in the still
+night air.
+
+Accredited pilgrim though one be not, to pass by so famous a shrine
+as Zenkoji without the tribute of a thought were to be more or less
+than human, even though one have paid his devoirs before.  Sought
+every year by thousands from all parts of Japan, it serves but to
+make the pilgrimage seem finer that the bourne itself should not be
+fine.  Large and curious architecturally for its roof, the temple is
+otherwise a very ordinary structure, more than ordinarily besoiled.
+There is nothing rich about it; not much that is imposing.  Yet in
+spite of poverty and dirt it speaks with a certain grandeur to the
+heart.  True shrine, whose odor of sanctity is as widespread as the
+breeze that wanders through its open portals, and which comes so near
+the wants of the world that the very pigeons flutter in to homes
+among its rafters.  The air-beats of their wings heighten the hush
+they would seem to break, and only enhance the sacred quiet of the
+nave,--a stillness such that the coppers of the faithful fall with
+exaggerated ring through the lattice of the almsbox, while the
+swiftly mumbled prayers of the givers rise in all simplicity straight
+to heaven.
+
+In and about the courtyard live the sacred doves, and he who will may
+have their company for the spreading of a feast of crumbs.  And the
+rush of their wings, as they descend to him from the sky, seems like
+drawing some strange benediction down.
+
+
+
+V.
+
+No.
+
+My quest still carrying me westward along the line of the new railway,
+I took the train again, and in the compartment of the carriage I found
+two other travelers.  They were a typical Japanese couple in middle
+life, and in something above middle circumstances.  He affected
+European clothes in part, while she still clung to the costume of her
+ancestors.  Both were smoking,--she her little pipe, and he the
+fashionable cigarette.  Their mutual relations were those of substance
+to shadow.  She followed him inevitably, and he trod on her feelings
+regardless of them.  She had been pretty when he took her to wife,
+and though worn and withered she was happy still.  As for him, he was
+quite satisfied with her, as he would have been quite satisfied
+without her.
+
+
+The roadbed soon left the Shinano plain, across which peered the
+opposite peaks, still hooded with snow, and wound up through a narrow
+valley, to emerge at last upon a broad plateau.  Three mountains
+flanked the farther side in file, the last and highest of the three,
+Myokosan, an extinct volcano; indeed, hardly more than the ruins of one.
+Time has so changed its shape, and the snow whitens its head so
+reverently, it would be possible to pass it by without a suspicion of
+its wild youth.  From the plateau it rose proudly in one long sweep
+from moor to shoulder, from shoulder to crag, from crag to snow, up
+into the leaden sky, high into its second mile of air.  Subtly the
+curve carried fancy with it, and I found myself in mind slowly
+picking my way upward, threading an arete here and scaling a slope
+there, with all the feelings of a genuine climb.  While I was still
+ascending in this insubstantial manner, clouds fell upon the summit
+from the sky, and from the summit tumbled down the ravines into the
+valley, and met me at Naoyetsu in a drizzling rain.
+
+Naoyetsu is not an enlivening spot to be landed at in a stress of
+weather; hardly satisfactory, in fact, for the length of time needed
+to hire jinrikisha.  It consisted originally of a string of fishermen's
+huts along the sea.  To these the building of the railway has
+contributed a parallel row of reception booths, a hundred yards
+in-shore; and to which of the two files to award the palm for
+cheerlessness it would be hard to know.  The huts are good of a kind
+which is poor, and the booths are poor of a kind which is good.
+To decide between such rivals is a matter of mood.  For my part,
+I hasted to be gone in a jinrikisha, itself not an over-cheerful
+conveyance in a pour.
+
+The rain shut out the distance, and the hood and oil-paper apron
+eclipsed the foreground.  The loss was not great, to judge by what
+specimens of the view I caught at intervals.  The landscape was a
+geometric pattern in paddyfields.  These, as yet unplanted, were
+swimming in water, out of which stuck the stumps of last year's crop.
+It was a tearful sight.  Fortunately the road soon rose superior to
+it, passed through a cutting, and came out unexpectedly above the
+sea,--a most homesick sea, veiled in rain-mist, itself a
+disheartening drab.  The cutting which ushered us somewhat proudly
+upon this inhospitable outlook proved to be the beginning of a pass
+sixty miles long, between the Hida-Shinshiu mountains and the sea of
+Japan.
+
+I was now to be rewarded for my venture in an unlooked-for way; for I
+found myself introduced here to a stretch of coast worth going many
+miles to see.
+
+The provinces of Hida and Etchiu are cut off from the rest of Japan
+by sets of mountain ranges, impassable throughout almost their whole
+length.  So bent on barring the way are the chains that, not content
+with doing so in mid-course, they all but shut it at their ocean end;
+for they fall in all their entirety plumb into the sea.  Following
+one another for a distance of sixty miles, range after range takes
+thus its header into the deep.  The only level spots are the deltas
+deposited by the streams between the parallels of peak.  But these
+are far between.  Most of the way the road belts the cliffs, now near
+their base, now cut into the precipice hundreds of feet above the
+tide.  The road is one continuous observation point.  Along it our
+jinrikisha bowled.  In spite of the rain, the view had a grandeur
+that compensated for much discomfort.  It was, moreover, amply
+diversified.  Now we rushed out to the tip of some high cape, now we
+swung round into the curve of the next bay; now we wound slowly
+upward, now we slipped merrily down.  The headlands were endless, and
+each gave us a seascape differing from the one we folded out of sight
+behind; and a fringe of foam, curving with the coast, stretched like
+a ribbon before us to mark the way.
+
+We halted for the night at a fishing village called No: two lines of
+houses hugging the mountain side, and a single line of boats drawn
+up, stern on, upon the strand; the day and night domiciles of the
+amphibious strip of humanity, in domestic tiff, turning their backs
+to one another, a stone's throw apart.  As our kuruma men knew the
+place, while we did not, we let them choose the inn.  They pulled up
+at what caused me a shudder.  I thought, if this was the best inn,
+what must the worst be like!  However, I bowed my head to fate in the
+form of a rafter lintel, and passed in.  A dim light, which came in
+part from a hole in the floor, and in part from an ineffective lamp,
+revealed a lofty, grotto-like interior.  Over the hole hung a sort of
+witches' caldron, swung by a set of iron bars from the shadowy form
+of a soot-begrimed rafter.  Around the kettle crouched a circle of
+gnomes.
+
+Our entrance caused a stir, out of which one of the gnomes came forward,
+bowing to the ground.  When he had lifted himself up enough to be seen,
+he turned out quite human.  He instantly bustled to fetch another light,
+and started to lead the strangers across the usual slippery sill and
+up the nearly perpendicular stairs.  Why I was not perpetually
+falling down these same stairways, or sliding gracefully or otherwise
+off the corridors in a heap, will always be a mystery to me.  Yet,
+with the unimportant exception of sitting down occasionally to put on
+my boots, somewhat harder than I meant, I remember few such mishaps.
+It was not the surface that was unwilling; for the constant scuffle
+of stocking feet has given the passageways a polish mahogany might
+envy.
+
+The man proved anything but inhuman, and very much mine host.
+How courteous he was, and in what a pleased mind with the world,
+even its whims of weather, his kind attentions put me!  He really did
+so little, too.  Beside numberless bows and profuse politeness,
+he simply laid a small and very thin quilt upon the mats for me to
+sit on, and put a feeble brazier by my side.  So far as mere comfort
+went, the first act savored largely of supererogation, as the mats
+were already exquisitely clean, and the second of insufficiency,
+since the brazier served only to point the cold it was powerless to
+chase.  But the manner of the doing so charmed the mind that it
+almost persuaded the grumbling body of content.
+
+As mine host bowed himself out, a maid bowed herself in, with a tray
+of tea and sugar-plums, and a grace that beggared appreciation.
+
+"His Augustness is well come," she said, as she sank on her knees and
+bowed her pretty head till it touched the mats; and the voice was
+only too human for heaven.  Unconsciously it made the better part of
+a caress.
+
+"Would his Augustness deign to take some tea?  Truly he must be very
+tired;" and, pouring out a cup, she placed it beside me as it might
+have been some beautiful rite, and then withdrew, leaving me, beside
+the tea, the perfume of a presence, the sense that something
+exquisite had come and gone.
+
+I sat there thinking of her in the abstract, and wondering how many
+maids outside Japan were dowried with like grace and the like voice.
+With such a one for cupbearer, I could have continued to sip tea, I
+thought, for the rest of my natural, or, alas, unnatural existence.
+
+There I stayed, squatting on my feet on the mats, admiring the mimic
+volcano which in the orthodox artistic way the charcoal was arranged
+to represent, and trying my best to warm myself over the idea.
+But the idea proved almost as cold comfort as the brazier itself.
+The higher aesthetic part of me was in paradise, and the bodily half
+somewhere on the chill confines of outer space.  The spot would no
+doubt have proved wholly heaven to that witty individual who was so
+anxious to exchange the necessities of life for a certainty of its
+luxuries.  For here, according to our scheme of things, was everything
+one had no right to expect, and nothing that one had.  My European
+belongings looked very gross littering the mats; and I seemed to
+myself a boor beside the unconscious breeding of those about me.
+Yet it was only a poor village inn, and its people were but peasants,
+after all.
+
+I pondered over this as I dined in solitary state; and when I had
+mounted my funeral pyre for the night, I remember romancing about it
+as I fell asleep.
+
+I was still a knight-errant, and the princess was saying all manner
+of charming things to me in her still more charming manner, when I
+became aware that it was the voice of the evening before wishing me
+good-morning.  I opened my eyes to see a golden gleam flooding the
+still-shut shoji, and a diamond glitter stealing through the cracks
+that set the blood dancing in my veins.  Then, with a startling
+clatter, my princess rolled the panels aside.
+
+Windows are but half-way shifts at best.  The true good-morning comes
+afield, and next to that is the thrill that greets the throwing your
+whole room wide to it.  To let it trickle in at a casement is to wash
+in a dish.  The true way is to take the sunshine with the shock of a
+plunge into the sea, and feel it glow and tingle all over you.
+
+The rain had taken itself off in the night, and the air sparkled with
+freshness.  The tiny garden court lay in cool, rich shadow, flecked
+here and there with spots of dazzle where a ray reflected found a
+pathway in, while the roofs above glistened with countless
+starpoints.
+
+Nor was mine host less smiling than the day, though he had not
+overcharged me for my room.  I was nothing to him, yet he made me
+feel half sorry to go.  A small pittance, too, the tea money seemed,
+for all that had gone with it.  We pay in this world with copper for
+things gold cannot buy.  Humanities are so cheap--and so dear.
+
+The whole household gathered in force on its outer sill to wish us
+good luck as we took the street, and threw sayonaras ("if it must be
+so") after us as we rolled away.
+
+There is a touch of pathos in this parting acquiescence in fate.
+If it must be so, indeed!  I wonder did mine host suspect that I did
+not all leave,--that a part of me, a sort of ghostly lodger, remained
+with him who had asked me so little for my stay?  Probably in body I
+shall never stir him again from beside his fire, nor follow as he
+leads the way through the labyrinth of his house; but in spirit, at
+times, I still steal back, and I always find the same kind welcome
+awaiting me in the guest room in the ell, and the same bright smile
+of morning to gild the tiny garden court.  The only things beyond the
+grasp of change are our own memories of what once was.
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+On a New Cornice Road.
+
+The sunshine quickened us all, and our kuruma took the road like a
+flock of birds; for jinrikisha men in company run as wild geese fly,
+crisscross.  It is an artistic habit, inculcated to court ladies in
+books on etiquette.  To make the men travel either abreast or in
+Indian file, is simply impossible.  After a moment's conformity, they
+invariably relapse into their own orderly disorder.
+
+This morning they were in fine figure and bowled us along to some
+merry tune within; while the baby-carriages themselves jangled the
+bangles on their axles, making a pleasing sort of cry.  The village
+folk turned in their steps to stare and smile as we sped past.
+
+It was a strange-appearing street.  On both sides of it in front of
+the houses ran an arcade, continuous but irregular, a contribution of
+building.  Each house gave its mite in the shape of a covered portico,
+which fitted as well as could be expected to that of its next door
+neighbor.  But as the houses were not of the same size, and the
+ground sloped, the roofs of the porticos varied in level.  A similar
+terracing held good of the floors.  The result was rather a
+federation than a strict union of interests.  Indeed, the object in
+view was communal.  For the arcades were snow galleries, I was told,
+to enable the inhabitants in winter to pass from one end of the
+village to the other, no inconsiderable distance.  They visored both
+sides of the way, showing that then in these parts even a crossing of
+the street is a thing to be avoided.  Indeed, by all report the
+drifts here in the depth of winter must be worth seeing.  Even at
+this moment, May the 6th, there was still neve on some of the lowest
+foothills, and we passed more than one patch of dirt-grimed snow
+buttressing the highway bank.  The bangles on the axles now began to
+have a meaning, a thing they had hitherto seemed to lack.  With the
+snow arcades by way of introduction they spoke for themselves.
+Evidently they were first cousins of our sleighbells.  Here, then,
+as cordially as with us man abhors an acoustic vacuum, and when Nature
+has put her icy bell-glass over the noises of the field, he must
+needs invent some jingle to wile his ears withal.
+
+Once past the houses we came upon a strip of paddyfields that bordered
+the mountain slope to the very verge of the tide.  Some of these
+stood in spots where the tilt of the land would have seemed to have
+precluded even the thought of such cultivation.  For a paddyfield
+must be perfectly level, that it may be kept under water at certain
+seasons of the year.  On a slope, therefore, a thing a paddyfield
+never hesitates to scale, they rise in terraces, skyward.  Here the
+drop was so great that the terraces made bastions that towered
+proudly on the very knife-edge of decision between the seaweed and
+the cliffs.  A runnel tamed to a bamboo duct did them Ganymede service.
+For a paddyfield is perpetually thirsty.
+
+It was the season of repairing of dykes and ditches in rice chronology,
+a much more complicated annal than might be thought.  This initial
+stage of it has a certain architectural interest.  Every year before
+planting begins the dykes have all to be re-made strictly in place,
+for they serve for both dams and bounds to the elaborately
+partitioned fields.  Adjacent mud is therefore carefully plastered
+over the remains of the old dyke, which, to the credit of the former
+builders, is no small fraction of it, and the work then finished off
+with a sculptor's care.  An easier-going peasantry might often forego
+renewal.  Indeed, I cannot but think the farmers take a natural
+delight in this exalted form of mud pies; they work away on already
+passable specimens with such a will.  But who does quite outgrow his
+childish delights?  And to make of the play of childhood the work of
+middle life, must be to foil the primal curse to the very letter.
+What more enchanting pastime than to wade all day in viscous mud,
+hearing your feet plash when you put them in, and suck as you draw
+them out; while the higher part of you is busied building a parapet
+of gluey soil, smoothing it down on the sides and top, and crowning
+your masterpiece with a row of sprigs along the crest?  And then in
+the gloaming to trudge homeward, feeling that you have done a
+meritorious deed after all!  When I come to my second childhood,
+I mean to turn paddyfield farmer myself.
+
+Though the fields took to the slopes so kindly, they had a preference
+for plains.  In the deltas, formed by the bigger streams, they
+expanded till they made chesswork of the whole.  Laborers knee deep
+in the various squares did very well for pawns.  The fields being
+still in their pre-natal stage, were not exactly handsome.  There was
+too much of one universal brown.  This was relieved only by the
+nurseries of young plants, small fields here and there just showing a
+delicate downy growth of green, delightful to the eye.  They were not
+long sown.  For each still lay cradled under its scarecrow, a pole
+planted in the centre of the rectangle with strings stretched to the
+four corners, and a bit of rag fluttering from the peak.  The
+scarecrows are, no doubt, useful, since they are in general use; but
+I counted seven sparrows feeding in reckless disregard of danger
+under the very wings of one of the contrivances.
+
+The customs of the country seemed doomed that day to misunderstanding,
+whether by sparrows or by bigger birds of passage.  Those which
+should have startled failed of effect, and those which should not
+have startled, did.  For, on turning the face of the next bluff,
+we came upon a hamlet apparently in the high tide of conflagration.
+From every roof volumes of smoke were rolling up into the sky, while
+men rushed to and fro excitedly outside.  I was stirred, myself, for
+there seemed scant hope of saving the place, such headway had the
+fire, as evidenced by the smoke, already acquired.  The houses were
+closed; a wise move certainly on the score of draft, but one that
+precluded a fighting of the fire.  I was for jumping from the
+jinrikisha to see, if not to do something myself, when I was stopped
+by the jinrikisha men, who coolly informed me that the houses were
+lime-kilns.
+
+It appeared that lime-making was a specialty of these parts, being,
+in fact, the alternative industry to fishing, with the littoral
+population; the farming of its strip of ricefields hardly counting as
+a profession, since such culture is second nature with the Far Oriental.
+Lime-making may labor under objections, considered generically, but
+this method of conducting the business is susceptible of advantageous
+imitation.  It should commend itself at once to theatrical managers
+for a bit of stage effect.  Evidently it is harmless.  No less
+evidently it is cheap; and in some cases it might work a double
+benefit.  Impresarios might thus consume all the public statuary
+about the town to the artistic education of the community, besides
+producing most realistic results in the theatre.
+
+Through the courtesy of some of the laborers I was permitted to enter
+a small kiln in which they were then at work.  I went in cautiously,
+and came out with some haste, for the fumes of the burning, which
+quite filled the place, made me feel my intrusion too poignantly.
+I am willing to believe the work thoroughly enjoyable when once you
+become used to it.  In the meantime, I should choose its alternative,
+--the pleasures of a dirty fishing boat in a nasty seaway,--if I were
+unfortunate enough to make one of the population.  I like to breathe
+without thinking of it.
+
+The charcoal used in the process came, they told me, from Noto.
+I felt a thrill of pride in hearing the land of my courting thus
+distinctively spoken of, although the mention were not by way of any
+remarkable merit.  At least the place was honorably known beyond its
+own borders; had in fact a certain prestige.  For they admitted there
+was charcoal in their own province, but the best, they all agreed,
+came from their neighbor over the sea.  They spoke to appreciative
+ears.  I was only too ready to believe that the best of anything came
+from Noto.  Did they lay my interest to the score of lime-making,
+I wonder, or were they in part undeceived when I asked if Noto were
+visible from where we were?
+
+"It was," they said, "on very clear days." "Did I know Noto?" What
+shall a man say when questioned thus concerning that on which he has
+set his heart?  He cannot say yes; shall he say no and put himself
+without the pale of mere acquaintance?  There is a sense of nearness
+not to be justified to another, and the one to whom a man may feel
+most kin is not always she of whom he knows the most.
+
+"I am by way of knowing it," I said, as my eyes followed my thoughts
+horizonward.  Was it all mirage they saw or thought to see, that
+faint coastline washed a little deeper blue against the sky?  I fear
+me so, for the lime-burners failed to make it out.  The day was not
+clear enough, they said.
+
+But the little heap of charcoal at least was real, and it had once
+been a tree on that farther shore.  Charcoal to them, it was no
+longer common charcoal to me; for, looking at it, was I not face to
+face with something that had once formed part of Noto, the unknown!
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+Oya Shiradzu, Ko Shiradzu.
+
+Toward the middle of the afternoon we reached a part of the coast
+locally famous or infamous, for the two were one; a stretch of some
+miles where the mountains made no apology for falling abruptly into
+the sea.  Sheer for several hundred feet, the shore is here unscalable.
+Nor did it use to be possible to go round by land, for the cliffs are
+merely the ends of mountain-chains, themselves utterly wild and
+tractless.  A narrow strip of sand was the sole link between Etchiu
+on the one hand and Echigo on the other.  The natives call the place
+Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, that is, a spot where the father no longer
+knows the child, nor the child the father; so obliterating to sense
+of all beside is the personal danger.  Refuge there is none of any
+kind.  To have been caught here in a storm on the making tide, must
+indeed have been to look death in the face.
+
+Between the devil of a precipice and the deep sea, he who ventured on
+the passage must have hurried anxiously along the thread of sand,
+hoping to reach the last bend in time.  As he rounds the ill-omened
+corner he sees he is too late; already the surf is breaking against
+the cliff.  He turns back only to find retreat barred behind by
+rollers that have crept in since he passed.  His very footprints have
+all been washed away.  Caged!  Like the walls of a deep-down dungeon
+the perpendicular cliff towers at his side, and in the pit they rim,
+he and the angry ocean are left alone together.  Then the sea begins
+to play with him, creeping catlike up.  Her huge paws, the breakers,
+buffet his face.  The water is already about his feet, as he backs
+desperately up against the rock.  And each wave comes crushing in
+with a cruel growl to strike--short this time.  But the next breaks
+closer, and the next closer still.  He climbs a boulder.  The spray
+blinds him.  He hears a deafening roar; feels a shock that hurls him
+into space, and he knows no more.
+
+Now the place is fearful only to fancy.  For a road has been built,
+belting the cliffs hundreds of feet above the tide.  It is a part of
+what is known as the new road, a name it is likely long to keep.
+Its sides are in places so steep that it fails of its footing and is
+constantly slipping off into the sea.  Such sad missteps are the
+occasion for bands of convicts to appear on the scene under the
+marshaling of a police officer and be set to work to repair the slide
+by digging a little deeper into the mountain-side.  The convicts wear
+clothes of a light brick-color which at a distance looks a little
+like couleur de rose, while the police are dressed in sombre
+blue.  It would seem somewhat of a satire on the facts!
+
+The new road is not without its sensation to such as dislike looking
+down.  Fortunately, the jinrikisha men have not the instinct of
+packmules to be persistently trifling with its outer edge.
+In addition to the void at the side, another showed every now and then
+in front, where a dip and a turn completely hid the road beyond.
+The veritable end of the world seemed to be there just ahead, close
+against the vacancy of space.  A couple of rods more and we must step
+off--indeed the end of the world for us if we had.
+
+When the road came to face the Oya shiradzu, ko shiradzu, it attacked
+the rise by first running away from it up a stream into the mountains;
+a bit of the wisdom of the serpent that enabled it to gain much
+height on the bend back.  Trees vaulted the way tapestrying it with
+their leaves, between which one caught peeps at the sea, a shimmer of
+blue through a shimmer of green.  The path was strung with pedlars
+and pilgrims; the latter of both sexes and all ages, under mushroom
+hats with their skirts neatly tucked in at the waist, showing their
+leggings; the former doing fulcrum duty to a couple of baskets swung
+on a pole over their shoulders.  The pilgrims were on their way back
+from Zenkoji.  Some of them would have tramped over two hundred miles
+on foot before they reached home again.  A rich harvest they brought
+back, religion, travel, and exercise all in one, enough to keep them
+happy long.  I know of nothing which would more persuade me to be a
+Buddhist than these same delightful pilgrimages.  Fresh air, fresh
+scenes on the road, and fresh faith at the end of it.  No desert
+caravan of penance to these Meccas, but a summer's stroll under a
+summer's sky.  An end that sanctifies the means and a means that no
+less justifies its end.
+
+While we were still in the way with these pious folk we touched our
+midday halt, a wayside teahouse notched in a corner of the road
+commanding a panoramic view over the sea.  The place was kept by a
+deaf old lady and her tailless cat.  The old lady's peculiarity was
+personal; the cat's was not.  No self-respecting cat in this part of
+Japan could possibly wear a tail.  The northern branch of the family
+has long since discarded that really useless feline appendage.  A dog
+in like circumstance would be sadly straitened in the expression of
+his emotions, but a cat is every whit a cat without a continuation.
+
+With the deaf old lady we had, for obvious reasons, no sustained
+conversation.  She busied herself for the most part in making dango,
+a kind of dumpling, but not one calculated to stir curiosity, since
+it is made of rice all through.  These our men ate with more relish
+than would seem possible.  Meanwhile I sat away from the road where I
+could look out upon the sea over the cliffs, and the cat purred about
+in her offhand way and used me incidentally as a rubbing post.  Trees
+fringed the picture in front, and the ribbon of road wound off through
+it into the distance, beaded with folk, and shot with sunshine and
+shadow.
+
+I was sorry when lunch was over and we took leave of our gentle
+hostesses; tabbies both of them, yet no unpleasing pair.  A few more
+bends brought us to where the path culminated.  The road had for some
+time lain bare to the sea and sky, but at the supreme point some fine
+beeches made a natural screen masking the naked face of the precipice.
+On the cutting above, four huge Chinese characters stood graved in
+the rock.
+
+"Ya no gotoku, to no gotoshi."
+
+"Smooth as a whetstone, straight as an arrow," meaning the cliff.
+Perhaps because of their pictorial descent, the characters did not
+shock one.  Unlike the usual branding of nature, they seemed not out
+of keeping with the spot.  Not far beyond, the butts of the winter's
+neve, buried in dirt, banked the path.
+
+For miles along the raod the view off was superb.  Nothing bordered
+one side of the way and the mountain bordered the other.  Far below
+lay the sea, stretching away into blue infinity, a vast semicircle of
+ultramarine domed by a hemisphere of azure; and it was noticeable how
+much vaster the sea looked than the sky.  We were so high above it that
+the heavings of its longer swells were leveled to imperceptibility,
+while the waves only graved the motionless surface.  Here and there
+the rufflings of a breeze showed in darker markings, like the changes
+on watered silk.  The most ephemeral disturbance made the most show.
+Dotted over the blue expanse were black spots, fishing boats; and a
+steamer with a long trail of smoke showed in the offing, stationary
+to the eye, yet shifting its place like the shadow of a style when
+you forgot to look.  And in long perspective on either hand stretched
+the battlement of cliff.  Visual immensity lay there before us, in
+each of its three manifestations; of line, of surface, and of space.
+
+We stood still, the better to try to take it in--this grandeur
+tempered by sunshine and warmth.  Do what he will, man is very much
+the creature of his surroundings yet.  In some instant sense, the
+eyes fashion the feelings, and we ourselves grow broader with our
+horizon's breadth.  The Chaldean shepherds alone with the night had
+grander thoughts for the companionship, and I venture to believe that
+the heart of the mountaineer owes quite as much to what he is forced
+to visage as to what he is compelled to do.
+
+We tucked ourselves into our jinrikisha and started down.  By virtue
+of going, the speed increased, till the way we rolled round the
+curves was intoxicating.  The panorama below swung to match, and we
+leaned in or out mechanically to trim the balance.  Occasionally, as
+it hit some stone, the vehicle gave a lurch that startled us for a
+moment into sobriety, from which we straightway relapsed into
+exhilaration.  Curious this, how the body brings about its own
+forgetting.  For I was conscious only of mind, and yet mind was the
+one part of me not in motion.  I suppose much oxygen made me tipsy.
+If so, it is a recommendable tipple.  Spirits were not unhappily
+named after the natural article.
+
+It was late afternoon when we issued at last from our two days
+Thermopylae upon the Etchiu plain.  As we drew out into its expanse,
+the giant peaks of the Tateyama range came into view from behind
+their foothills, draped still in their winter ermine.  It was last
+year yet in those upper regions of the world, but all about us below
+throbbed with the heartbeats of the spring.  At each mile, amid the
+ever lengthening shadows, nature seemed to grow more sentient.
+Through the thick air the peaks stood out against the eastern sky, in
+saffron that flushed to rose and then paled to gray.  The ricefields,
+already flooded for their first working, mirrored the glow overhead
+so glassily that their dykes seemed to float, in sunset illusion,
+a mere bar tracery of earth between the sky above and a sky beneath.
+Upon such lattice of a world we journeyed in mid-heaven.  Stealthily
+the shadows gathered; and as the hour for confidences drew on, nature
+took us into hers.  The trees in the twilight, just breaking into
+leaf, stood in groups among the fields and whispered low to one
+another, nodding their heads; and then from out the shadow of the May
+evening came the croaking of the frogs.  Strangely the sound fitted
+the hour, with its like touch of mysterious suggestion.  As the
+twilight indefinite, it pervaded everything, yet was never anywhere.
+Deafening at a distance, it hushed at our approach only to begin
+again behind us.  Will-o'-the-wisp of the ear, infatuating because
+forever illusive!  And the distance and the numbers blended what had
+perhaps been harsh into a mellow whole that filled the gloaming with
+a sort of voice.  I began to understand why the Japanese are so fond
+of it that they deem it not unworthy a place in nature's vocal
+pantheon but little lower than the song of the nightingale, and echo
+its sentiment in verse.  And indeed it seems to me that his soul must
+be conventionally tuned in whom this even-song of the ricefields
+stirs no responsive chord.
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Across the Etchiu Delta.
+
+The twilight lingered, and the road threaded its tortuous course for
+miles through the rice plain, bordered on either hand by the dykes of
+the paddyfields.  Every few hundred feet, we passed a farmhouse
+screened by clipped hedgerows and bosomed in trees; and at longer
+intervals we rolled through some village, the country pike becoming
+for the time the village street.  The land was an archipelago of
+homestead in a sea of rice.  But the trees about the dwellings so cut
+up the view, that for the moments of passing the mind forgot it was
+all so flat and came back to its ocean in surprise, when the next
+vista opened on the sides.
+
+Things had already become silhouettes when we dashed into
+lantern-lighted Mikkaichi.  We took the place in form, and a fine
+sensation we made.  What between the shouts of the runners and the
+clatter of the chaises men, women and children made haste to clear a
+track, snatching their little ones back and then staring at us as we
+swept past.  Indeed, the teams put their best feet foremost for local
+effect, and more than once came within an ace of running over some
+urchin who either would not or could not get out of the way.
+Fortunately no casualties occurred.  For it would have been
+ignominious to have been arrested by the police during our first ten
+minutes in the town, not to speak of the sad dampening to our
+feelings an accident would have caused.
+
+In this mad manner we dashed up the long main street.  We were forced
+to take the side, for the village aqueduct or gutter--it served both
+purposes--monopolized the middle.  At short intervals, it was spanned
+by causeways made of slabs of stone.  Over one of these we made a
+final swirl and drew up before the inn.  Then our shafts made their
+obeisance to the ground.
+
+A warm welcome greeted the appeal.  A crowd of servants came rushing
+to the front of the house with an eye to business, and a crowd of
+village folk with an eye to pleasure closed in behind.  Between the
+two fires we stepped out and entered the side court, to the
+satisfaction of the one audience and the chagrin of the other.
+But it is impossible to please everybody.
+
+Fortunately it was not so hard to please us, and certainly the inn
+people did their best; for they led the way to what formerly were the
+state apartments, that part of the house where the daimyo of Kaga had
+been wont to lodge when he stopped here over night on his journey
+north.  Though it had fallen somewhat into disrepair, it was still
+the place of honor in the inn, and therefore politely put at the
+service of one from beyond sea.  There I supped in solitary state,
+and there I slept right royally amid the relics of former splendor,
+doubting a little whether some unlaid ghost of bygone times might not
+come to claim his own, and oust me at black midnight by the rats, his
+retinue.
+
+But nothing short of the sun called me back to consciousness and bade
+me open to the tiny garden, where a pair of ducks were preening their
+feathers after an early bath in their own little lake.  On the
+veranda my lake already stood prepared; a brass basin upon a wooden
+stand, according to the custom of the country.  So ducks and I
+dabbled and prinked in all innocence in the garden, which might well
+have been the garden of Eden for any hint it gave of a world beyond.
+It was my fate, too, to leave it after the same manner.
+For breakfast over we were once more of the road.
+
+We had a long day of it before us, for I purposed to cross the Etchiu
+delta and sleep that night on the threshold of my hopes.  The day,
+like all days that look long on the map, proved still longer on the
+march.  Its itinerary diversified discomfort.  First seventeen miles
+in kuruma, then a ferry, then a tramp of twelve miles along the beach
+through a series of sand dunes; then another ferry, and finally a
+second walk of seven miles and a half over some foothills to top off
+with.  The inexpensiveness of the transport was the sole relieving
+feature of the day.  Not, I mean, because the greater and worse half
+of the journey was done on our own feet, but because of the cheap
+charges of the chaises and even of the porters.  To run at a dogtrot,
+trundling another in a baby carriage, seventeen miles for twenty
+cents is not, I hold, an extortionate price.  Certain details of the
+tariff, however, are peculiar.  For instance, if two men share the
+work by running tandem, the fare is more than doubled; a ratio in the
+art of proportion surprising at first.  Each man would seem to charge
+for being helped.  The fact is, the greater speed expected of the
+pair more than offsets the decreased draft.
+
+Otherwise, as I say, the day was depressing.  It was not merely the
+tramp through the sand dunes that was regrettable, though heaven
+knows I would not willingly take it again.  The sand had far too
+hospitable a trick of holding on to you at every step to be to my
+liking.  Besides, the sun, which had come out with summer insistence,
+chose that particular spot for its midday siesta, and lay there at
+full length, while the air was preternaturally still.  It was a
+stupidly drowsy heat that gave no fillip to the feet.
+
+But such discomfort was merely by the way.  The real trouble began at
+Fushiki, the town on the farther side of the second ferry.  In the
+first place the spot had, what is most uncommon in Japan, a very
+sorry look, which was depressing in itself.  Secondly, its inhabitants
+were much too busy or much too unemployed, or both, to be able to
+attend to strangers at that hour of the afternoon.  Consequently it
+was almost impossible to get any one to carry the baggage.
+We dispatched emissaries, however.  By good luck we secured some beer,
+and then argued ourselves dry again on the luggage question.
+The emissaries were at work, we were assured, and at last some one
+who had been sent for was said to be coming.  Still time dragged on,
+until finally the burden bearers turned up, and turned out to
+be--women.
+
+At this I rebelled.  The situation was not new, but it was none the
+less impossible.  In out-of-the-way districts I had refused offers of
+the kind before.  For Japanese beasts of burden run in a decreasing
+scale as follows, according to the poverty of the place: jinrikisha,
+horses, bulls, men, women.  I draw my line at the last.  I am well
+aware how absurd the objects themselves regard such a protective
+policy, but I cling to my prejudices.  To the present proffer I was
+adamant.  To step jauntily along in airy unencumberedness myself,
+while a string of women trudged wearily after, loaded with my heavy
+personal effects, was more than an Anglo-Saxon attitude towards the
+sex could stand.  I would none of them, to the surprise and dismay of
+the inn landlord, and to the no slight wonder of the women.
+The discarding was not an easy piece of work.  The fair ones were
+present at it, and I have no doubt misinterpreted the motive.
+For women have a weakness for a touch of the slave-master in a man.
+Beside, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," though it be only
+in the capacity of a porter.  There was nothing for it, however, but
+to let it go at that.  For to have explained with more insistence
+would infallibly have deepened their suspicions of wounded vanity.
+But it did seem hard to be obliged to feel a brute for refusing to be
+one.
+
+The landlord, thanks to my importunities, managed after some further
+delay to secure a couple of lusty lads, relatives, I suspect, of the
+discarded fair ones, and with them we eventually set out.  We had not
+gone far, when I came to consider, unjustly, no doubt, that they
+journeyed too slow.  I might have thought differently had I carried
+the chattels and they the purse.  I shuddered to think what the
+situation would have been with women, for then even the poor solace
+of remonstrance would have been denied.  As it was, I spent much
+breath in trying to hurry them, and it is pleasanter now than it was
+then to reflect how futilely.  For I rated them roundly, while they
+accepted my verbal goadings with the trained stolidity of folk who
+were used to it.
+
+When at last we approached the village of our destination, which bore
+the name of Himi, it was already dusk, and this with the long May
+twilight meant a late hour before we should be comfortably housed.
+Indeed, I had been quartered in anticipation for the last few miles,
+and was only awaiting arrival to enter into instant possession of my
+fancied estate.  Not content even with pure insubstantiality, I had
+interviewed various people through Yejiro on the subject.  First, the
+porters had been exhaustively catechized, and then what wayfarers we
+chanced to meet had been buttonholed beside; with the result of much
+contradictory information.  There seemed to be an inn which was,
+I will not say good, but the best, but no two informants could agree
+in calling it by name.  One thought he remembered that the North Inn
+was the place to go to; another that he had heard the Wistaria House
+specially commended.
+
+All doubts, however, were set at rest when we reached the town.
+For without the slightest hesitation, every one of the houses in
+question refused to take us in.  The unanimity was wonderful
+considering the lack of collusion.  Yejiro and I made as many
+unsuccessful applications together as I could stand.  Then I went
+and sat down on the sill of the first teahouse for a base of
+operations--I cannot say for my headquarters, because that is just
+what we could not get--and gave myself up to melancholy.  Meanwhile
+Yejiro ransacked the town, from which excursions he returned every
+few minutes with a fresh refusal, but the same excuse.  It got so at
+last I could anticipate the excuse.  The inn was full already--of
+assessors and their victims.  The assessors had descended on the
+spot, it seemed, and the whole country-side had come to town to lie
+about the value of its land.  I only wished the inhabitants might
+have chosen some other time for false swearing.  For it was a sad tax
+on my credulity.
+
+We did indeed get one offer which I duly went to inspect, but the
+outside of the house satisfied me.  At last I adopted extreme
+measures.  I sent Yejiro off to the police station.  This move
+produced its effect.
+
+Even at home, from having contrived to keep on the sunny side of the
+law and order, my feelings toward the police are friendly enough for
+all practical purposes; but in no land have I such an affectionate
+regard for the constabulary as in Japan.  Members of the force there,
+if the term be applicable to a set of students spectacled from
+over-study, whose strength is entirely moral, never get you into
+trouble, and usually get you out of it.  One of their chief charms to
+the traveler lies in their open-sesame effect upon obdurate
+landlords.  In this trick they are wonderfully successful.
+
+Having given ourselves up to the police, therefore, we were already
+by way of being lodged, and that quickly.  So indeed it proved.
+In the time to go and come, Yejiro reappeared with an officer in
+civilian's clothes, who first made profuse apologies for presenting
+himself in undress, but it seemed he was off duty at the moment,--and
+then led the way a stone's throw round the corner; and in five minutes
+I was sitting as snugly as you please in a capital room in an inn's
+third story, sipping tea and pecking at sugar plums, a distinctly
+honored guest.
+
+Here fate put in a touch of satire.  For it now appeared that all our
+trouble was quite gratuitous.  Most surprisingly the innkeepers'
+story on this occasion proved to be entirely true, a possibility I
+had never entertained for a second; and furthermore it appeared that
+our present inn was the one in which I had been offered rooms but had
+refused, disliking its exterior.
+
+Such is the reward for acting on general principles.
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Over the Arayama Pass.
+
+The morning that was to give me my self-promised land crept on tiptoe
+into the room on the third story, and touched me where I slept, and
+on pushing the shoji apart and looking out, I beheld as fair a day as
+heart could wish.  A faint misty vapor, like a bridal veil, was just
+lifting from off the face of things, and letting the sky show through
+in blue-eyed depths.  It was a morning of desire, bashful for its
+youth as yet, but graced with a depth of atmosphere sure to expand
+into a full, warm, perfect noon; and I hastened to be out and become
+a part of it.
+
+Three jinrikishas stood waiting our coming at the door, and amidst a
+pelting of sayonara from the whole household, we dashed off as
+proudly as possible down the main street of the town, to the
+admiration of many lookers-on. The air, laden with moisture, left
+kisses on our cheeks as we hurried by, while the sunshine fell in
+long scarfs of gauzy shimmer over the shoulders of the eastern hills.
+The men in the shafts felt the fillip of it all and encouraged one
+another with lusty cries, a light-heartedness that lent them heels.
+Even the peasants in the fields seemed to wish us well, as they
+looked up from their work to grin good-humoredly.
+
+We value most what we attain with difficulty.  It was on this
+principle no doubt that the road considerately proceeded to give out.
+It degenerated indeed very rapidly after losing sight of the town,
+and soon was no more than a collection of holes strung on ruts, that
+made travel in perambulators tiring alike to body and soul.  At last,
+after five miles of floundering, it gave up all pretence at a
+wheel-way, and deposited us at a wayside teahouse at the foot of a
+little valley, the first step indeed up the Arayama pass.  Low hills
+had closed in on the right, shutting off the sea, and the ridge
+dividing Noto from Etchiu rose in higher lines upon the left.
+
+Here we hired porters, securing them from the neighboring fields,
+for they were primarily peasants, and were porters only as we were
+tramps, by virtue of the country.  Porterage being the sole means of
+transport, they came to carry our things as they would have carried
+their own, in skeleton hods strapped to their backs.  In this they
+did not differ from the Japanese custom generally; but in one point
+they showed a strange advance over their fellows.  They were
+wonderfully methodical folk.  They paid no heed to our hurry, and
+instead of shouldering the baggage they proceeded to weigh it, each
+manload by itself, on a steelyard of wood six feet long; the results
+they then worked out conscientiously on an abacus.  After which I
+paid accordingly.  Truly an equitable adjustment between man and man,
+at which I lost only the time it took.  Then we started.
+
+From the teahouse the path rose steadily enough for so uneducated a
+way, leaving the valley to contract into an open glen.  The day,
+in the mean time, came out as it had promised, full and warm, fine
+basking weather, as a certain snake in the path seemed to think.  So,
+I judge, did the porters.  If it be the pace that kills, these simple
+folk must be a long-lived race.  They certainly were very careful not
+to hurry themselves.  Had they been hired for life, so thrifty a
+husbanding of their strength would have been most gratifying to
+witness; unluckily they were mine only for the job.  They moved, one
+foot after the other, with a mechanical precision, exhausting even to
+look at.  To keep with them was practically impossible for an ordinary
+pedestrian.  Nothing short of a woman shopping could worthily have
+matched their pace.  In sight their speed was snail-like; out of it
+they would appear to have stopped, so far did they fall behind.
+Once I thought they had turned back.
+
+The path we were following was the least traveled of the only two
+possible entrances into Noto by land.  It was a side or postern gate
+to the place, over a gap on the northern end of a mountain wall;
+the main approach lying along its other flank.  For a high range of
+uninhabited hills nearly dams the peninsula across, falling on the
+right side straight into the sea, but leaving on the other a lowland
+ligature that binds Noto to Kaga.  To get from Kaga into Etchiu, the
+range has to be crossed lower down.  Our dip in the chain was called
+the Arayama toge or Rough Mountain pass, and was perhaps fifteen
+hundred feet high, but pleasingly modeled in its lines after one ten
+times its height.
+
+Half-way up the tug of the last furlong, where the ascent became
+steep enough for zig-zags, I turned to look back.  Down away from me
+fell the valley, slipping by reason of its own slope out into the
+great Etchiu plain.  Here and there showed bits of the path in
+corkscrew, from my personal standpoint all perfectly porterless.
+Over the low hills, to the left, lay the sea, the crescent of its
+great beach sweeping grandly round into the indistinguishable
+distance.  Back of it stretched the Etchiu plain, but beyond that,
+nothing.  The mountains that should have bounded it were lost to
+sight in the spring haze.
+
+Mechanically my eyes followed up into the languid blue, when suddenly
+they chanced upon a little cloud, for cloud I took it to be.
+Yet something about it struck me as strange, and scanning it more
+closely, by this most natural kind of second sight, I marked the
+unmistakable glisten of snow.  It was a snow peak towering there in
+isolated majesty.  As I gazed it grew on me with ineffable grandeur,
+sparkling with a faint saffron glamour of its own.  Shifting my look
+a little I saw another and then another of the visions, like puffs of
+steam, rising above the plain.  Half apparitions, below a certain
+line, the snow line, they vanished into air, for between them and the
+solid earth there looked to be blue sky.  The haze of distance, on
+this soft May day, hid their lower slopes and left the peaks to tower
+alone into the void.  They were the giants of the Tateyama range,
+standing there over against me inaccessibly superb.
+
+A pair of teahouses, rivals, crowned the summit of the pass, which,
+like most Japanese passes, was a mere knife-edge of earth.  With a
+quickened pulse if a slackened gait, I topped the crest, walked
+--straight past the twin teahouses and their importunities to stop--
+another half-dozen paces to the brink, and in one sweep looked down
+over a thousand feet on the western side.  Noto, eyelashed by the
+branches of a tree just breaking into leaf, lay open to me below.
+
+After the first glow of attainment, this initial view was, I will
+confess, disillusioning.  Instead of what unfettered fancy had led me
+to expect, I saw only a lot of terraced rice-fields backed by ranges
+of low hills; for all the world a parquet in green and brown tiles.
+And yet, as the wish to excuse prompted me to think, was this not,
+after all, as it should be?  For I was looking but at the entrance to
+the land, its outer hallway, as it were; Nanao, its capital, its
+inland sea, all its beyond was still shut from me by the nearer
+hills.  And feeling thus at liberty to be amused, I forthwith saw it
+as a satire on panoramas generally.
+
+Panoramic views are painfully plain.  They must needs be mappy at
+best, for your own elevation flattens all below it to one topographic
+level.  Field and woodland, town or lake, show by their colors only
+as if they stood in print; and you might as well lay any good atlas
+on the floor and survey it from the lofty height of a footstool.
+Such being the inevitable, it was refreshing to see the thing in
+caricature.  No pains, evidently, had been spared by the inhabitants
+to make their map realistic.  There the geometric lines all stood in
+ludicrous insistence; any child could have drawn the thing as
+mechanically.
+
+The two teahouses were well patronized by wayfarers of both sexes,
+resting after their climb.  Some simply sipped tea, chatting; others
+made a regular meal of the opportunity.  The greater number sat, as
+we did, on the sill, for the trouble of taking off their straw sandals.
+Our landlady was the model of what a landlady should be, for it was
+apparently a feminine establishment.  If there was a man attached to
+it, he kept himself discreetly in the background.  She was a kind,
+sympathetic soul, with a word for every one, and a deliberateness of
+action as effective as it was efficient.  And in the midst of it all,
+she kept up a refrain of welcomes and good-bys, as newcomers appeared
+or old comers left.  The unavoidable preliminary exercise and the
+crisp air whetted all our appetites.  So I doubt not she drove a
+thriving trade, although to Western ideas of value her charges were
+infinitesimally small.
+
+Midday halts for lunch are godsends to tramps who travel with porters.
+They compel the porters to catch up, and give the hirer opportunity
+to say things which at least relieve him, if they do no good.  I had
+begun to fear ours would deprive me of this pleasure, and indeed had
+got so far on in my meal as to care little whether they did, when
+automatically they appeared.  Fortunately they needed but a short rest,
+and as the descent on the Noto side was much steeper than on the other,
+half an hour's walk brought us to the level of kuruma once more.
+
+A bit of lane almost English in look, bowered in trees and winding
+delightfully like some human stream, led us to a teahouse.  While we
+were ordering chaises a lot of children gathered to inspect us, thus
+kindly giving us our first view of the natives.  They looked more
+open-eyed than Japanese generally, but such effect may have been due
+to wonder.  At all events, the stare, if it was a stare, seemed like
+a silent sort of welcome.
+
+Leaving the children still gazing after us we bowled away toward
+Nanao, and in the course of time caught our first glimpse of it from
+the upper end of a sweep of meadows.  It sat by the water's edge at
+the head of a landlocked bay, the nearer arm of the inland sea; and
+an apology for shipping rode in the offing.  It seemed a very
+fair-sized town, and altogether a more lively place than I had
+thought to find.  Clearly its life was as engrossing to it as if no
+wall of hills notching the sky shut out the world beyond.  Having
+heard, however, that a watering-place called Wakura was the sight of
+the province, and learning now that it was but six miles further, we
+decided, as it was yet early in the afternoon, to push on, and take
+the capital later.  We did take it later, very much later the next
+night, than was pleasing.
+
+Wakura, indeed, was the one thing in Noto, except the charcoal, which
+had an ultra-Noto-rious reputation.  Rumors of it had reached us as
+far away as Shinshiu, and with every fresh inquiry we made as we
+advanced the rumors had gathered strength.  Our informants spoke of
+it with the vague respect accorded hearsay honor.  Clearly, it was no
+place to pass by.
+
+The road to it from Nanao was not noteworthy, but for two things; one
+officially commended to sight-seers, the other not.  The first was a
+curious water-worn rock upon the edge of the bay, some waif of a
+boulder, doubtless, since it stuck up quite alone out of the sand.
+A shrine perched atop, and a larger temple encircled it below, to which
+its fantastic cuttings served as gateway and garden.  The uncommended
+sight was a neighboring paddyfield, in which a company of frogs,
+caught trespassing, stood impaled on sticks a foot high, as awful
+warnings to their kind.  Beyond this the way passed through a string
+of clay cuttings following the coast, and in good time rolled us into
+the midst of a collection of barnlike buildings which it seemed was
+Wakura.
+
+The season for the baths had not yet begun, so that the number of
+people at the hotels was still quite small.  Not so the catalogue of
+complaints for which they were visited.  The list appalled me as I
+sat on the threshold of my prospective lodging, listening to mine
+host's encomiums on the virtues of the waters.  He expatiated
+eloquently on both the quantity and quality of the cures, quite
+unsuspicious that at each fresh recommendation he was in my eyes
+depreciating his own wares.  Did he hope that among such a handsome
+choice of diseases I might at least have one!  I was very near to
+beating a hasty retreat on the spot.  For the accommodation in
+Japanese inns is of a distressingly communistic character at best,
+and although at present there were few patients in the place, the
+germs were presumably still there on the lookout for a victim.
+
+Immediate comfort, however, getting the better of problematical risk,
+I went in.  The room allotted me lay on the ground floor just off the
+garden, and I had not been there many minutes before I became aware,
+as one does, that I was being stared at.  The culprit instantly
+pretended, with a very sheepish air, to be only taking a walk.  He
+was the vanguard of an army of the curious.  The people in the next
+room were much exercised over the new arrival, and did all decency
+allowed to catch a glimpse of me; for which in time they were
+rewarded.  Visitors lodged farther off took aimless strolls to the
+verandas, and looked at me when they thought I was not looking at
+them.  All envied the servants, who out-did Abra by coming when I
+called nobody, and then lingering to talk.  Altogether I was more of
+a notoriety than I ever hope to be again; especially as any European
+would have done them as well.  My public would have been greater, as
+I afterwards learned, if Yejiro had not been holding rival court in
+the kitchen.
+
+Between us we were given a good deal of local information.  One bit
+failed to cause me unmitigated delight.  We were not, it appeared,
+the first foreigners to set foot in Wakura.  Two Europeans had, in a
+quite uncalled-for way, descended upon the place the summer before,
+up to which time, indeed, the spot had been virgin to Caucasians.
+Lured by the fame of the springs, these men had come from Kanazawa in
+Kaga, where they were engaged in teaching chemistry, to make a test
+of the waters.  I believe they discovered nothing startling.  I could
+have predicted as much had they consulted me beforehand.  They
+neglected to do so, and the result was they came, saw and conquered
+what little novelty the place had.  I was quite chagrined.  It simply
+showed how betrodden in these latter days the world is.  There is not
+so much as a remote corner of it but falls under one of two heads;
+those places worth seeing which have already been seen, and those
+that have not been seen but are not worth seeing.  Wakura Onsen
+struck me as falling into the latter halves of both categories.
+
+While discussing my solitary dinner I was informed by Yejiro that
+some one wished to speak with me, and on admitting to be at home,
+the local prefect was ushered in.  He came ostensibly to vise my
+passport, a duty usually quite satisfactorily performed by any
+policeman.  The excuse was transparent.  He really came that he might
+see for himself the foreigner whom rumor had reported to have
+arrived.  As a passport on his part he presented me with some pride
+the bit of autobiography that he had himself once been in Tokyo;
+a fact which in his mind instantly made us a kind of brothers,
+and raised us both into a common region of superiority to our
+surroundings.  He asked affectionately after the place, and I
+answered as if it had been the one thought in both our hearts.
+It was a pleasing little comedy, as each of us was conscious of
+its consciousness by the other.  Altogether we were very friendly.
+
+Between two such Tokyoites it was, of course, the merest formality to
+vise a passport, but being one imposed by law he kindly ran his eye
+over mine.  As it omitted to describe my personal appearance in the
+usual carefully minute manner, as face oval, nose ordinary,
+complexion medium, and so forth, identification from mere looks was
+not striking.  So he had to take me on trust for what I purported to
+be, an assumption which did not disconcert him in the least.  With
+writing materials which he drew from his sleeve, he registered me
+then and there, and, the demands of the law thus complied with to the
+letter, left me amid renewed civilities to sleep the sleep of the
+just.
+
+
+
+X.
+
+An Inland Sea.
+
+They had told us overnight that a small steamer plied every other day
+through Noto's unfamed inland sea, leaving the capital early in the
+morning, and touching shortly after at Wakura.  As good luck would
+have it, the morrow happened not to be any other day, so we embraced
+the opportunity to embark in her ourselves.  On her, it would be more
+accurate to say, for she proved such a mite that her cabin was barely
+possible and anything but desirable.  By squatting down and craning
+my neck I peered in at the entrance, a feat which was difficult
+enough.  She was, in truth, not much bigger than a ship's gig; but
+she had a soul out of all proportion to her size.  The way it
+throbbed and strained and set her whole little frame quivering with
+excitement, made me think every moment that she was about to explode.
+The fact that she was manned exclusively by Japanese did not entirely
+reassure me.
+
+There was an apology for a deck forward, to which, when we were well
+under way, I clambered over the other passengers.  I was just sitting
+down there to enjoy a comfortable pipe when I was startlingly
+requested by a voice from a caboose behind to move off, as I was
+obscuring the view of the man at the wheel.  After that I perched on
+the gunwale.
+
+We steamed merrily out into the middle of the bay.  The water was
+slumberously smooth, and under the tawny haze of the morning it shone
+with the sheen of burnished brass.  From the gentle plowing of our
+bow it rolled lazily to one side, as if in truth it were molten metal.
+Land, at varying picturesque distances, lay on all sides of us.
+In some directions the shore was not more than a mile and a half off;
+in others, the eye wandered down a vista of water framed by low
+headlands for ten miles or more.  But the atmosphere gave the
+dominant thought, a strange slumber-like seclusion.  So rich and
+golden, it shut this little corner of the world in a sort of happy
+valley of its own, and the smoke from my pipe drifted dreamily
+astern, a natural incense to the spirits of the spot.
+
+The passengers suggested anything, from a public picnic to an early
+exploration party.  There were men, women and children of all ages
+and kinds, some stowed away in the cabin behind, some gathered in
+groups amidships; and those in the cabin thought small fry of those
+on deck.  The cabin was considered the place of honor because the
+company made one pay a higher price for the privilege of its
+discomfort.  Altogether it was a very pretty epitome of a voyage.
+
+Just as the steamer people were preparing for their first landing,
+there detached itself from the background of trees along the shore
+the most singular aquatic structure I think I have ever seen.
+It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a
+prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest.  Four poles
+planted in the water inclined to one another at such an angle that
+they crossed three-quarters of the way up.  The projecting quarters
+held in clutch a large wicker basket like the car of a balloon.
+Peering above the car was a man's head.  As the occupant below slowly
+turned the head to keep an eye on us, it suggested, amid its web of
+poles, some mammoth spider lying in wait for its prey.
+
+It was a matter of some wonder at first how the man got there, until
+the motion of the steamer turned the side and disclosed a set of
+cross poles lashed between two of the uprights, forming a rude sort
+of ladder.  Curiosity, satisfied on this primary point, next asked
+why he got there.  As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to
+Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else;
+a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant.
+This somebody else told him the man was fishing.  Except for the
+immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like it in my
+life.
+
+Such, however, was the fact.  The wigwam was connected by strings to
+the entrance of a sort of weir, and the man who crouched in the basket
+was on the lookout for large fish, of a kind called bora.  As soon as
+one of them strayed into the mouth of the net, the man pulled the
+string which closed the opening.  The height of his observatory above
+the level of the water enabled him to see through it to the necessary
+depth.  I am a trifle hazy over the exact details of the apparatus,
+as I never saw a fish inquisitive enough to go in; but I submit the
+existence of the fishermen in proof that it works.
+
+Having deposited such wights as wished to go ashore--for the place
+was of no pretension--our steam fish once more turned its tail and
+darted us through some narrows into another bay.  It must have been a
+favorite one with bora, as its shores were dotted with fish-lookouts.
+The observatories stood a few stone-throws out in deepish water, at
+presumably favorable points, and never very near one another, lest
+they should interfere with a possible catch.  Some were inhabited,
+some not.
+
+This bay was further remarkable for a solar halo which I chanced to
+see on glancing up at the sun.  I suppose it was the singular quality
+of the light that first caused me to look overhead.  For a thin veil
+of cloud had drawn over the blue and tempered the sunshine peculiarly.
+Of course one is familiar with caricatures of the thing in
+meteorological books; but the phenomenon itself is not so common,
+and the effect was uncanny.  At the first glance it seemed a bit of
+Noto witchery, that strangely luminous circle around the sun.
+To admire the moon thus bonneted, as the Japanese say, is common enough,
+and befits the hour.  But to have the halo of the night hung aloft in
+broad day is to crown sober noon with enchantment.
+
+The sheet of water was sparsely dotted with sail.  One little craft
+in particular I remember, whose course bore her straight down upon us.
+She dilated slowly out of the distance, and then passed so close I
+might have tossed a flower aboard of her.  So steady her motion she
+seemed oblivious to our presence, as she glided demurely by at
+relatively doubled speed.
+
+Only after we had passed did she show signs of noticing us at all.
+For, meeting our wake, the coquette, she suddenly began dropping us
+curtseys in good-by.
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Anamidzu.
+
+We seemed bound that day to meet freaks in fishing-tackle.  The next
+one to turn up was a kind of crinoline.  This strange thing confronted
+us as we disembarked at Anamidzu.  Anamidzu was the last port in the
+inland sea.  After touching here the steamer passed out into the sea
+of Japan and tied up for the night at a small port on the eastern
+side of the nose of the peninsula.
+
+As the town lay away from the shore up what looked like a canal, we
+were transferred to a small boat to be rowed in.  Just as we reached
+the beginnings of the canal we saw squatting on the bank an old crone
+contemplating, it seemed, the forlorn remains of a hoopskirt which
+dangled from a pole before her, half in and half out of water.  The
+chief difference between this and the more common article of commerce
+was merely one of degree, since here the ribs by quite meeting at the
+top entirely suppressed the waist.  Their lower extremities were hid
+in the water and were, I was informed, baited with hooks.
+
+The old lady's attitude was one of inimitable apathy; nor did she so
+much as blink at us, as we passed.  A little farther up, on the
+opposite bank, sat a similar bit of still life.  A third beyond
+completed the picture.  These good dames bordered the brink like so
+many meditative frogs.  Though I saw them for the first time in the
+flesh, I recognized them at once.  Here were the identical fisherfolk
+who have sat for centuries in the paintings of Tsunenobu, not a whit
+more immovable in kakemono than in real life.  I almost looked to
+find the master's seal somewhere in the corner of the landscape.
+
+The worthy souls were, I was told, inkyos; a social, or rather
+unsocial state, which in their case may be rendered unwidowed
+dowagers; since, in company with their husbands, they had renounced
+all their social titles and estates.  Their daughters-in-law now did
+the domestic drudgery, while they devoted their days thus to sport.
+
+Whether it were the dames, or the canal, or more likely still, some
+touch of atmosphere, but I was reminded of Holland.  Indeed, I know
+not what the special occasion was.  It is a strange fabric we are so
+busy weaving out of sensations.  Let something accidentally pick up
+an old thread, and behold, without rhyme or reason, we are treated to
+a whole piece of past experience.  Stranger yet when but the
+background is brought back.  For we were unconscious of the warp
+while the details were weaving in.  Yet reproduce it and all the woof
+starts suddenly to sight.  For atmosphere, like a perfume, does
+ghostly service to the past.
+
+There is something less mediate in my remembrance of Anamidzu.  The
+place has to me a memory of its own that hangs about the room they
+made mine for an hour.  It was certainly a pretty room; surprisingly
+so, for such an out-of-the-way spot.  I dare say it was only that to
+my fellow-voyager of the steamer, hurrying homeward to Wakamatsu.
+I could hear him in the next apartment making merry over his midday
+meal.  To him the place stood for the last stage on the journey home.
+But to me, it meant more.  It marked both the end of the beginning,
+and the beginning of the end.  For I had fixed upon this spot for my
+turning point.
+
+It was high noon in my day of travel, like the high noon there
+outside the open shoji.  The siesta of sensation had come.  Thus far,
+the coming events had cast their shadows before and I had followed;
+now they had touched their zenith here in mid-Noto.  Henceforth I
+should see them moving back again toward the east.  The dazzling
+sunshine without pointed the shade within, making even the room seem
+more shadowy than it was.  I began to feel creeping over me that
+strange touch of sadness that attends the supreme moment of success,
+though fulfillment be so trifling a thing as a journey's bourne.
+Great or little, real or fancied, the feeling is the same in kind.
+The mind seems strangely like the eye.  Satisfy some emotion it has
+been dwelling on, and the relaxed nerves at once make you conscious
+of the complementary tint.
+
+Then other inns in Japan came up regretfully across the blue distance
+of the intervening years, midday halts, where an hour of daydream lay
+sandwiched in between two half days of tramp.  And I thought of the
+companions now so far away.  Having heard the tune in a minor key,
+these came in as chords of some ampler variation, making a kind of
+symphony of sentiment, where I was brought back ever and anon to the
+simple motif.  And the teahouse maidens entered and went out again
+like mutes in my mind's scene.
+
+I doubt not the country beyond is all very commonplace, but it might
+be an Eldorado from the gilding fancy gave it then.  I was told the
+hills were not high, and that eighteen miles on foot would land the
+traveler at Wakamatsu on the sea of Japan, fronting Korea, but seeing
+only the sea, and I feel tolerably sure there is nothing there to
+repay the tramp.  When a back has bewitched you in the street, it is
+a fatal folly to try to see the face.  You will only be disillusioned
+if you do.
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+At Sea Again.
+
+I was roused from my mid-Noto reverie by tidings that our boat was
+ready and waiting just below the bridge.  This was not the steamer
+which had long since gone on its way, but a small boat of the country
+we had succeeded in chartering for the return voyage.  The good
+inn-folk, who had helped in the hiring, hospitably came down to the
+landing to see us off.
+
+The boat, like all Japanese small boats, was in build between a
+gondola and a dory, and dated from a stage in the art of rowing prior
+to the discovery that to sit is better than to stand even at work.
+Ours was a small specimen of its class, that we might the quicker
+compass the voyage to Nanao, which the boatmen averred to be six ri
+(fifteen miles).  My estimate, prompted perhaps by interest, and
+certainly abetted by ignorance, made it about half that distance.
+My argument, conclusive enough to myself, proved singularly unshaking
+to the boatmen, who would neither abate the price in consequence nor
+diminish their own allowance of the time to be taken.
+
+The boat had sweeps both fore and aft, each let in by a hole in the
+handle to a pin on the gunwale.  She was also provided with a sail
+hoisting on a spar that fitted in amidships.  The sail was laced
+vertically: a point, by the way, for telling a Japanese junk from a
+Chinese one at sea, for Cathay always laces horizontally.
+
+Whatever our private beliefs on the probable length of the voyage,
+both crew and passengers agreed charmingly in one hope, namely, that
+there might be as little rowing about it as possible.  Our reasons
+for this differed, it is true; but as neither side volunteered
+theirs, the difference mattered not.  So we slipped down the canal.
+
+The hoopskirt fisher-dames were just where we had left them some
+hours before, and were still too much absorbed in doing nothing to
+waste time looking at us.  I would gladly have bothered them for a
+peep at their traps, but that it seemed a pity to intrude upon so
+engrossing a pursuit.  Besides, I feared their apathy might infect
+the crew.  Our mariners, though hired only for the voyage, did not
+seem averse to making a day of it, as it was.
+
+One thing, however, I was bent on stopping to inspect, cost what it
+might in delay or discipline; and that was a fish-lookout.  To have
+seen the thing from a steamer's deck merely whetted desire for nearer
+acquaintance.  To gratify the wish was not difficult; for the shore
+was dotted with them like blind light-houses off the points.  I was
+for making for the first visible, but the boatmen, with an eye to
+economy of labor, pointed out that there was one directly in our path
+round the next headland.  So I curbed my curiosity till on turning
+the corner it came into view.  As good luck would have it, it was
+inhabited.
+
+We pulled up alongside, gave its occupants good-day, and asked leave
+to mount.  The fishermen, hospitable souls, offered no objection.
+This seemed to me the more courteous on their part, after I had made
+the ascent, for there were two of them in the basket, and a visitor
+materially added to the already uneasy weight.  But then they were
+used to it.  The rungs of what did for ladder were so far apart as to
+necessitate making very long legs of it in places, which must have
+been colossal strides for the owners.  The higher I clambered, the
+flimsier the structure got.  However, I arrived, not without
+unnecessary trepidation, wormed my way into the basket and crouched
+down in some uneasiness of mind.  The way the thing swayed and
+wriggled gave me to believe that the next moment we should all be
+shot catapultwise into the sea.  To call it topheavy will do for a
+word, but nothing but experience will do for the sensation.  This
+oscillation, strangely enough, was not apparent from the sea; which
+reminds me to have noticed differences due the point of view before.
+
+I was greeted by an extensive outlook.  The shore, perhaps a hundred
+yards away, ran shortly into a fisher hamlet, and then into a long
+line of half submerged rocks, like successive touches of a skipping
+stone.  Beyond the end of this indefinite point, and a little to the
+right of it, stood another lookout.  This was our only near neighbor,
+though others could be seen in miniature in the distance, faint
+cobwebs against the coast.  The bay stretched away on all sides,
+landlocked at last, except where to the east an opening gave into the
+sea of Japan.
+
+To a dispassionate observer the basket may have been twenty feet
+above the water.  To one in the basket, it was considerably higher
+--and its height was emphasized by its seeming insecurity.
+The fishermen were very much at home in it, but to me the sensation
+was such as to cause strained relations between my will to stay and
+my wish to be gone.
+
+But strong feelings are so easily changed into their opposites!  I can
+imagine one of these eyries a delightful setting to certain moods.
+A deserted one should be the place of places for reading a romance.
+The solitude, the strangeness, and the cradle-like swing, would all
+compose to shutting out the world.  To paddle there some May morning,
+tie one's boat out of sight beneath, and climb up into the nest to
+sit alone half poised in the sky in the midst of the sea, should
+savor of a new sensation.  After a little acclimatization it would
+probably become a passion.  Certainly, with a pipe, it should induce
+a most happy frame of mind for a French novel.  The seeming risk of
+the one situation would serve to point those of the other.
+
+The fishermen received my thanks with amiability, watched us with
+stolid curiosity as we pulled off, and then relapsed into their
+former semi-comatose condition.  Their eyrie slipped perspectively
+astern, sank lower and lower, and suddenly was lost against the
+background of the coast.
+
+The favoring breeze we were always hoping for never came.  This was a
+bitter disappointment to the boatmen, who thus found themselves
+prevented from more than occasional whiffs of smoking.  Once we had
+out the spar and actually hoisted the sail, a godsend of an excuse to
+them for doing nothing for the next few minutes; but it shortly had
+to come down again and on we rowed.
+
+Our surroundings made a pretty sight.  A foreground of water, smooth
+as one could wish had he nowhere to go, with illusive cat's-paws of
+wind playing coyly all around, marking the great shield with dark
+scratches, and never coming near enough to be caught except when the
+sail was down.  Fold upon fold of low hills in the distance, with
+hamlets showing here and there at their bases by the sea.  And then,
+almost like a part of the picture, so subtly did the sensations
+blend, the slow cadenced creak of the sweeps on the gunwale, a
+rhythmic undercurrent of sound.
+
+At intervals, a wayfarer under sail, bound the other way, crept
+slowly by, carrying, as it seemed to our envious eyes, his own capful
+of wind with him; and once a boat, bound our way and not under sail,
+passed us not far off.  Our boatmen were beautifully blind to this
+defeat till their attention had been specifically called to it for an
+explanation.  They then declared the victor to be lighter than we,
+and this in face of our having chosen their craft for just that
+quality.  What per cent of such statements, I wonder, do the makers
+expect to have credited?  And if any appreciable amount, which is the
+more sold, the artless deceiver or his less simple victim?
+
+But we always headed in the direction of Nanao, and the shores
+floated by through the long spring afternoon.  At last they began to
+contract upon us till, by virtue of narrowing, they shot us through
+the straits in water clear as crystal, and then widening again,
+dropped us adrift in Wakura bay.  Though not so beloved of bora, the
+bay was most popular with other fish.  Schools of porpoises turned
+cart-wheels for our amusement, and in spots the water was fairly
+alive with baby jelly-fish.  On the left lay Monkey island, so called
+from a certain old gentleman who had had a peculiar fondness for
+those animals.  His family of poor relations had disappeared at his
+death, and the island was now chiefly remarkable for a curious clay
+formation, which time had chiseled into cliffs so mimicking a folding
+screen that they were known by the name.  They were perfectly level
+on top and perpendicular on the sides, and as double-faced as the
+most matter-of-fact nicknamer could desire. Sunset came, found us
+still in the bay and left us there.  Then the dusk crept up from the
+black water beneath, like an exhalation.  It grew chilly.
+
+Just as we were turning the face of Screen cliff a sound of singing
+reached us, ricochetting over the water.  It had a plaintive ring
+such as peasant songs are wont to have, and came, as we at length
+made out, from a boat homeward bound from the island, steering a
+course at right angles to our own.  The voices were those of women,
+and as our courses swept us nearer each other, we saw that women
+alone composed the crew.  They had been faggot-cutting, and the
+bunches lay piled amidships, while fore and aft they plied their
+oars, and sang.  The gloaming hid all but sound and sex, and threw
+its veil of romance over the trollers, who sent their hearts out thus
+across the twilight sea.  The song, no doubt some common ditty,
+gathered a pathos over the water through the night.  It swept from
+one side of us to the other, softened with distance, lingered in
+detached strains, and then was hushed, leaving us once more alone
+with the night.
+
+Still we paddled on.  It was now become quite dark, quite cold, quite
+calm, and we were still several good miles off from Nanao.  At length
+on turning a headland the lights of the town and its shipping came
+out one by one from behind a point, the advance guards first, then
+the main body, and wheeling into line took up their post in a long
+parade ahead.  We began to wonder which were the nearer.  There is a
+touch of mystery in making a harbor at night.  In the daytime you see
+it all well-ordered by perspective.  But as you creep slowly in
+through the dark, the twinkles of the shipping only doubtfully point
+their whereabouts.  The most brilliant may turn out the most remote,
+and the faintest at first the nearest after all.  Your own motion
+alone can sift them into place.  If we could voyage through the sea
+of space, it would be thus we might come upon some star-cluster and
+have the same delightful doubt which should become our sun the first.
+
+In half an hour they were all about us; the nearer revealing by their
+light the dark bodies connected with them; the farther still showing
+only themselves.  The teahouses along the water-front made a
+milky-way ahead.  We threaded our course between the outlying lights
+while the milky-way resolved itself into star-pointed silhouettes.
+Then skirting along it, we drew up at last at a darksome quay, and
+landed Yejiro to hunt up an inn.  I looked at my watch; it was ten
+o'clock.  We had not only passed my estimate of time somewhere in the
+middle of the bay; we had exceeded even the boatmen's excessive
+allowance.  Somehow we had put six hours to the voyage.  I began to
+realize I had hired the wrong men.  Nor was the voyage yet over, if
+remaining attached to the boat for fully an hour more be entitled to
+count.  For Yejiro did not return, and the boatmen and I waited.
+
+I was glad enough to make pretence at arrival by getting out of the
+boat on to the quay.  The quay was a dismal place.  I walked out to
+the farther end, where I found an individual haunting it with an idea
+to suicide apparently.  His course struck me as so appropriate that I
+felt it would be hollow mockery to argue the point with him.  He must
+have become alarmed at the possibility, however, for he made off.
+Heaven knows he had small cause to fear; I was certainly at that
+moment no unsympathetic soul.
+
+Having only come to grief on the quay, I next tried a landward stroll
+with much the same effect.  The street or place that gave upon the
+wharf was as deserted as the wharf itself.  Half the houses about it
+were dark as tombs; the other half showed only glimmering shoji
+taunting me by the sounds they suffered to escape, or by a chance
+silhouette thrown for a moment upon the paper wall by some one
+within.  And now and then, as if still further to enhance the
+solitude, a pair passed me by in low self-suited talk.
+
+Still no sign of the boy.  Every few minutes I would walk back to the
+boat and linger beside it till I could no longer stand the mute
+reproach of the baskets huddled in a little pile on the stones, poor,
+houseless immigrants that they were.  And from time to time I made a
+touching spectacle of myself, by pulling out my watch and peering, by
+what feeble light I could find, anxiously at its face to make out the
+hour.
+
+At last Yejiro turned up in the company of a policeman.  This official,
+however, proved to be accompanying him in a civil capacity, and,
+changing into a guide, led the way through several dark alley-waysto
+an inn of forbidding face, but better heart.  There did we eventually
+dine, or breakfast, for by that time it was become the next day.
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+On the Noto Highway.
+
+On the morrow morning we took the road in kuruma, the road proper,
+as Yejiro called it; for it was the main bond between Noto and the rest
+of Japan.  This was the nearest approach it had to a proper name,
+a circumstance which showed it not to be of the first importance.
+For in Japan, all the old arteries of travel had distinctive names,
+the Nakasendo or Mid-Mountain road, the Tokaido or Eastern Sea road,
+and so forth.  Like certain other country relations, their importance
+was due to their city connections, not to their own local magnitude.
+For, when well out of sight of the town, they do not hesitate to
+shrink to anything but imposing proportions.  In mid career you might
+often doubt yourself to be on so celebrated a thoroughfare.  But they
+are always delightful to the eye, as they wander through the country,
+now bosomed in trees among the mountains, now stalking between their
+own long files of pine, or cryptomeria, across the well-tilled plains.
+This one had but few sentinels to line it in the open, but lost
+little in picturesqueness for its lack of pomp.  It was pretty enough
+to be very good company itself.
+
+It was fairly patronized by wayfarers to delight the soul; cheerful
+bodies, who, though journeying for business, had plenty of time to be
+happy, and radiated content.  Take it as you please, the Japanese
+people are among the very happiest on the face of the globe, which
+makes them among the most charming to meet.
+
+Nothing notable beyond such pleasing generalities of path and people
+lay in our way, till we came to a place where a steep and perfectly
+smooth clay bank shot from a spur of the hills directly into the
+thoroughfare.  Three urchins were industriously putting this to its
+proper use, coasting down it, that is, on the seats of what did them
+for breeches.  An over-grown-up regard for my own trousers alone
+deterred me from instantly following suit.  No such scruples
+prevented my abetting them, however, to the extent of a trifling
+bribe for a repetition.  For they had stopped abashed as soon as they
+found they had a public.  Regardless of maternal consequences, I thus
+encouraged the sport.  But after all, was it so much a bribe as an
+entrance fee to the circus, or better yet, a sort of subsidy from an
+ex-member of the fraternity?  Surely, if adverse physical circumstances
+preclude profession in person, the next best thing is to become a
+noble patron of art.
+
+From this accidental instance, I judged that boys in Noto had about
+as good a time of it as boys elsewhere; the next sight we chanced
+upon made me think that possibly women did not.  We had hardly parted
+from the coasters on dry ground when we met in the way with a lot of
+women harnessed to carts filled with various merchandise, which they
+were toilsomely dragging along towards Nanao.  It was not so
+picturesque a sight as its sex might suggest.  For though the women
+were naturally not aged, and some had not yet lost all comeliness of
+feature, this womanliness made the thing the more appealing.  Noto
+was evidently no Eden, since the local Adam had thus contrived to
+shift upon the local Eve so large a fraction of the primal curse.
+It was as bad as the north of Germany.  The female porters we had been
+offered on the threshold of the province were merely symptomatic of
+the state of things within.  I wonder what my young Japanese friend,
+the new light, to whom I listened once on board ship, while he launched
+into a diatribe upon the jinrikisha question, the degrading practice,
+as he termed it, of using men for horses,--I wonder, I say, what he
+would have said to this!  He was a quixotic youth, at the time
+returning from abroad, where he had picked up many new ideas.
+His proposed applications of them did him great credit, more than
+they are likely to win among the class for whom they were designed.
+A cent and two thirds a mile, to be had for the running for it, is as
+yet too glittering a prize to be easily foregone.
+
+Of the travel in question, we were treated to forty-three miles'
+worth that day, by relays of runners.  The old men fell off
+gradually, to be replaced by new ones, giving our advance the
+character of a wave, where the particles merely oscillated, but the
+motion went steadily on.  The oscillations, however, were not
+insignificant in amount.  Some of the men must have run their
+twenty-five miles or more, broken only by short halts; and this at a
+dog-trot, changed of course to a slower pull on bad bits, and when
+going up hill.  A fine show of endurance, with all allowances.
+In this fashion we bowled along through a smiling agricultural
+landscape, relieved by the hills upon the left, and with the faintest
+suspicion, not amounting to a scent, of the sea out of sight on the
+right.  The day grew more beautiful with every hour of its age.
+The blue depths above, tenanted by castles of cloud, granted fancy
+eminent domain to wander where she would.  Even the road below gave
+free play to its caprice, and meandered like any stream inquisitively
+through the valley, visiting all the villages within reach, after a
+whimsical fashion of its own.  All about it, meadows were tilling,
+and the whole landscape breathed an air of well-established age, amid
+the lustiness of youth.  The very farmhouses looked to have grown
+where they stood, as indeed the upper part of them had.  For from the
+thatch of their roofs, deep bedded in mud, sprang all manner of
+plants that made of the eaves gardens in the air.  The ridgepoles
+stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of grass
+waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the
+passers-by.  What a contented folk this should be whose very homes
+can so vegetate!  Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus
+to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to
+life again!
+
+At the threshold of Kaga we turned abruptly to the left, and attacked
+the pass leading over into Etchiu.  As we wound our way up the narrow
+valley, day left the hollows to stand on rosy tiptoe on the sides of
+the hills, the better to take flight into the clouds.  There it
+lingered a little, folding the forests about with its roseate warmth.
+Even the stern old pines flushed to the tips of their shaggy branches,
+while here and there a bit of open turned a glowing cheek full to the
+good-night kiss of the sun.  And over beyond it all rose the twilight
+bow, in purplish insubstantiality creeping steadily higher and
+higher, above the pine-clad heights.
+
+I reached the top before the jinrikisha, and as a sort of reward of
+merit scrambled a little farther up the steep slope to the left.
+From here I commanded the pass, especially that side of it I had not
+come up.  The corkscrew of the road carried the eye most pleasingly
+down with it.  I could see a teahouse a few hundred feet below, and
+beyond it, at a much lower level, a bridge.  Beyond this came a
+comparatively flat stretch, and then the road disappeared into a
+gorge.  Here and there it was pointed with people toiling slowly up.
+Of the encircling hills the shoulders alone were visible.  While I
+was still surveying the scene, the jinrikisha men, one after the
+other, emerged from the gulf out of sight on the right and proceeded
+to descend into the one on the left.  When the last had well passed,
+and I had tickled myself with the sense of abandonment, I scrambled
+back, took a jump into the road and slipped down after them.  The
+last had waited for me at the teahouse, and stowing me in started to
+rattle down the descent.  The road, unlike us, seemed afraid of its
+own speed, and brought itself up every few hundred feet with a round
+turn.  About each of these we swung, only to dash down the next bend,
+and begin the oscillation over again.  The men were in fine excitement,
+and kept up a shouting out of mere delight.  In truth we all enjoyed
+the dissipated squandering in a few minutes of the energy of position
+we had so laboriously gained by toiling up the other side.  Over the
+bridge we rattled, bowled along the level stretch, and then into the
+gorge and once more down, till in another ten minutes the last fall
+had shot us out into the plain with mental momentum enough to carry
+us hilariously into Imaisurugi, where we put up for the night.
+
+At breakfast the next morning the son of the house, an engaging lad,
+presented me with an unexpected dish, three fossil starfish on a
+platter.  They were found, he said, in numbers, on the sides of the
+hill hard by; a fact which would go to prove that this part of Japan
+has been making in later geologic time.  Indeed, I take it the better
+part of Etchiu has thus been cast up by the sea, and now lies between
+its semicircle of peaks and its crescent of beach, like a young moon
+in the western sky, a new bay of ricefield in the old bay's arms.
+We had come by way of its ocean terminator along its fringe of sand;
+we were now to cross its face.
+
+As we pulled out from the town and entered the great plain of
+paddyfields it was like adventuring ourselves in some vast expanse of
+ocean, cut up only by islets of trees.  So level the plain and so
+still the air on this warm May morning, the clumps shimmered in
+mirage in the distance like things at sea.  Farmhouses and peasants
+at work in the fields loomed up as ships, past which we slowly tacked
+and then dropped them out of sight behind.  And still no end of the
+same infinite level.  New clumps rose doubtfully afar, took on form
+and vanished in their turn.  Our men rolled along at a good six-knot
+gait, and mile went to join mile with little perceptible effect on
+the surroundings.  Only the misty washes of the mountains, glistening
+in spots with snow, came out to the south and then swung slowly round
+like the sun himself.  Occasionally, we rolled into a village of
+which I duly inquired the distance from the last known point.  One of
+these, Takaoka, was a very large place and stretched a mile or more
+along the road, with ramifications to the side.
+
+At last we neared some foothills which we crossed by a baby pass, and
+from the farther side looked off against the distant Tateyama range.
+Descending again, another stretch of plain brought us to Toyama,
+the old feudal capital of the province.  It is still a bustling town,
+and does a brisk business, I was told, in patent medicine, which is
+hawked over Japan generally and cures everything.  But the former
+splendor of the place has left it forever.  The rooms in the inn,
+where neighboring daimyos were wont to rest on their journeys
+through, are still superb with carving, lacquer and paintings, but no
+daimyo will ever again hold his traveling court before their tokonoma.
+The man perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has
+gone to join the past.  Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the
+daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the
+breeding of those about him disillusion his midday dream.
+
+The castle they have turned into a public school; and as I strolled
+into its close I met bands of boys in foreign lycee-like uniform
+trooping out; chubby-faced youngsters in stiff visored caps.  Girls
+there were too, in knots of twos and threes, pretty little things in
+semi-European dress, their hair done a la grecque, stuck with a
+single flower, who stopped in their chatter to stare at me.  To think
+that the feudal times are to them as much a tale as the making of the
+plain itself where its ruins stand already mantled with green!
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+The Harinoki Toge.
+
+There now befell us a sad piece of experience, the result of misplaced
+confidence in the guidebook.  Ours was the faith a simple public pins
+upon print.  Le journal, c'est un jeune homme, as Balzac said, and
+even the best of guidebooks, as this one really was, may turn out--a
+cover to many shortcomings.
+
+Its description of the crossing of the Harinoki toge implied a
+generality of performances that carried conviction.  If he who read
+might not run, he had, at least, every assurance given him that he
+would be able to walk.  That the writer might not only have been the
+first to cross, but the last, as well, was not evident from the text.
+Nor was it there apparent that the path which was spoken of as
+difficult and described as "hanging to the precipitous side of the
+cliff," might have become tired of hanging thus for the sake of
+travelers who never came, and have given itself over at last to the
+abyss.
+
+In the book, the dead past still lived an ever-youthful present.
+In truth, however, the path at the time of the account, some twelve
+years before, had just been made by the samurai of Kaga to join them
+to the capital.  Since then the road by the sea had been built, and
+the Harinoki pass had ceased to be in practice what it purported to
+be in print.  It had in a double sense reverted to type.  There was
+small wonder at this, for it was a very Cerberus of a pass at best,
+with three heads to it.  The farthest from Etchiu was the Harinoki
+toge proper.
+
+The guidebook and a friend had gone over one season, and the guidebook
+had induced another friend to accompany him again the year after.
+Whether there were any unpersonally conducted ascents I am not sure.
+But at any rate, all this happened in the early days; for years the
+Harinoki toge had had rest.
+
+We ought to have taken warning from the general skepticism we met
+with at Toyama, when we proposed the pass.  But with the fatal faith
+of a man in his guidebook, we ignored the native forebodings.
+Besides, there were just people enough who knew nothing about it, and
+therefore thought it could be done, to encourage us in our delusion.
+Accordingly we left Toyama after lunch in the best of spirits, in
+jinrikisha, for Kamidaki, or Upper Fall, to which there professed to
+be a jinrikisha road.  The distance was three ri, seven miles and a
+half.  Before we had gone one of them the road gave out, and left us
+to tack on foot in paths through the rice-fields, which in one long
+inclination kept mounting before us.  Just before reaching the village,
+a huge tree in full faint purple bloom showed up a little to the left.
+Under a sudden attack of botanical zeal, I struck across lots to
+investigate, and after much tacking among the paddy dykes found,
+to my surprise, on reaching it, that the flowers came from a huge
+wistaria that had coiled itself up the tree.  The vine must have been
+at least six feet round at the base, and had a body horribly like an
+enormous boa that swung from branches high in air.  The animal look
+of the vegetable parasite was so lifelike that one both longed and
+loathed to touch it at the same time.
+
+At Kamidaki, after the usual delay, we found porters, who echoed the
+doubts of the people of Toyama, and went with us protesting.  Half an
+hour after this we came to the Jindogawa, a river of variable
+importance.  It looked to have been once the bed of a mighty glacier
+that should have swept grandly round from unseen fastnesses among the
+hills.  At the time of our visit, it was, for the most part, a waste
+of stones through which two larger and several lesser streams were in
+much worry to find their way to the sea.  The two larger were just
+big enough to be unfordable; so a Charon stationed at each ferried
+the country folk across.  At the smaller, after picking out the
+likeliest spots, we took off our shoes and socks and waded, and then,
+upon the other side, sat some time on stones, ill-modeled to that
+end, to draw our things on again.
+
+Our way now led up the left bank--the right bank, according to
+aquatic convention, which pleasingly supposes you to be descending
+the stream.  It lay along a plateau which I doubt not to have been
+the river's prehistoric bed, so evidently had the present one been
+chiseled out of it to a further depth of over fifty feet.  At first
+the path struck inland, astutely making a chord to the river's bow,
+an unsuspected sign of intelligence in a path.  It was adventurous,
+too, for soon after coming out above the brink, it began upon
+acrobatic feats in which it showed itself nationally proficient.
+A narrow aqueduct had been cut out of the side of the cliff, and along
+its outer embankment, which was two feet wide, the path proceeded to
+balance.  The aqueduct had given way in spots, which caused the path
+to take to some rickety boards put there for its benefit.  After this
+exhibition of daring, it descended to the stream, to rise again later.
+Meanwhile night came on and the river bottom began to fill with what
+looked to be mist, but was in reality smoke.  This gave a weird
+effect to the now mountainous settings.  Into the midst of it we
+descended to a suspension bridge of twisted strands of the wistaria
+vine, ballasted at the ends with boulders piled from the river's bed.
+The thing swayed cheerfully as we passed over.
+
+On the top of the opposite bank stood perched a group of houses, not
+enough to make a village, and far too humble to support an inn.
+But in their midst rose a well-to-do temple, where, according to the
+guidebook, good lodging was to be had.  It may indeed be so.  For our
+part we were not so much as granted entry.  An acolyte, who parleyed
+with us through the darkness, reported the priest away on business,
+and refused to let us in on any terms.  Several bystanders gathered
+during the interview, and had it not been for one of them we might
+have been there yet.  From this man we elicited the information that
+another hamlet lay half a mile further up, whose head-man, he thought,
+might be willing to house us.  We followed straight on until some
+buildings showed in still blacker silhouette against the black sky,
+and there, after some groping in the dark and a second uncanny
+conversation through a loophole,--for the place was already boarded
+up for the night,--we were finally taken in.
+
+The house was a generous instance of a mountain farmhouse.
+The floors were innocent of mats, and the rooms otherwise pitiably
+barnlike.  Yet an air of largeness distinguished the whole.  It was
+clearly the home of a man of standing in his community, one who lived
+amply the only life he knew.  You felt you already knew the man from
+his outer envelope.  And this in some sort prepared me for a little
+scene I was shortly to witness.  For while waiting for Yejiro to get
+dinner ready I became aware that something was going on in what stood
+for hall; and on pushing the shoji gently apart I beheld the whole
+household at evening prayers before an altar piece, lighted by
+candles and glittering with gilded Buddhas and bronze lotus flowers.
+The father intoned the service from a kind of breviary, and the
+family joined from time to time in the responses.  There was a
+sincerity and a sweet simplicity about the act that went to my heart
+and held me there.  At the close of it the family remained bowed
+while the intoner reverently put out the lights and folded the doors
+upon the images within.  Locked in that little case lay all the
+luxury which the family could afford, and to which the rest of the
+house was stranger.  There is something touching in any heartfelt
+belief, and something pathetic too.
+
+This peaceful parenthesis was hardly past before the trials of travel
+intruded themselves again.  The porters proved refractory.  They had
+agreed to come only as far as they could, and now they refused to
+proceed further.  Here was a pretty pass.  To turn back now was worse
+than not to have set out at all.  Besides, we had not yet even come
+in sight of the enemy.  Yejiro reasoned with them for some hours in
+the kitchen, occasionally pausing for lack of further argument to
+report his want of progress.  It seemed the men valued their lives
+above a money consideration, strangely enough.  They made no bones
+about it; the thing was too dangerous.  The streams they declared
+impassable, and the charcoal burners the only men who knew the path.
+Yejiro at once had these witnesses subpoenaed, and by good luck one of
+them came, who, on being questioned, repeated all the porters had
+said.  But Yejiro's blood was up, and he boldly played his last
+trump.  He threatened them with the arm of the law, a much more
+effective weapon in Japan than elsewhere.  He proposed, in fine, to
+walk three ri down the valley to the nearest police station and fetch
+a policeman who should compel them to move on.  It is perhaps open to
+doubt whether even a Japanese policeman's omnipotence would have
+extended so far.  But the threat, though not conclusive, had some
+effect.  This strategic stroke I only learnt of later, and I laughed
+heartily when I did.  That night, however, it was no laughing matter,
+and I began to have doubts myself.  But it was no time for
+misgivings, so I went in to help.  The circle round the kitchen fire
+was not a cheerful sight.  To have the courage of one's convictions
+is rare enough in this weak world, but to have the courage of one's
+doubts is something I uncover to.  To furnish pluck for a whole
+company including one's self; to hearten others without letting them
+see how sore in need of heartening is the heartener, touches my
+utmost admiration.  If only another would say to him that he might
+believe the very things he does not believe, as he says them to that
+other; they then might at least seem true.  Ignorance saved me.  Had
+I known what they did, I should have agreed with them on the spot.
+As it was, I did what I could, and went back to my own room, the prey
+of somewhat lonely thoughts.
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+Toward the Pass.
+
+I was waked by good news.  The porters had, to a certain extent,
+come round.  If we would halve their burdens by doubling their number,
+they would make an attempt on the pass, or, rather, they would go on
+as far as they could.  This was a great advance.  To be already
+moving implies a momentum of the mind which carries a man farther
+than he means.  I acquiesced at once.  The recruits consisted of the
+master of the house--his father, the officiator at family prayers,
+had retired from the cares of this world--and a peasant of the
+neighborhood.  The charcoal burners were too busy with their own
+affairs.  From the sill, as I put on my boots, I watched with
+complacence the cording of the loads, and then, with quite a
+lightsome gait, followed the lengthened file out into the street.
+One after the other we tramped forth past the few houses of the
+place, whose people watched us go, with the buoyant tread of those
+about to do great things, and so out into the open.
+
+The path appeared very well.  It trotted soberly along across a
+mountain moor until it came out above the river.  It then wound up
+stream, clinging to the slope several hundred feet above the valley
+bottom.  It was precipitous in places, but within reason, and I was
+just coming to consider the accounts exaggerated when it descended to
+the river bed at a point where a butt of neve stuck a foot into the
+shingle.  The stream, which had looked a thread from above, turned
+out a torrent when we stood upon its brink.  The valley was nothing
+but river bed, a mass of boulders of all sizes, through the midst of
+which the stream plunged with deafening roar, and so deep that
+fording was out of the question.  A man's life would not have been
+worth a rush in it.
+
+We followed up the boulder bank in search of a more propitious spot.
+Then we followed down again.  Each place promised at a distance, and
+baulked hope at hand.  At last, in despair, we came to a halt
+opposite the widest and shallowest part, and after no end of urging,
+one of the porters stripped, and, armed with his pole, ventured in.
+The channel lay well over to the farther side; thrice he got to its
+nearer edge and thrice he turned back, as the rush of water became
+too great.  His life was worth too much to him, he said, not
+unnaturally, for him to throw it away.  Yet cross the stream we must,
+or return ignominiously; for the path we had so far followed had
+fallen over the cliff in front.
+
+We improved the moments of reflection to have lunch.  While we were
+still discussing viae and viands, and had nearly come to the end of
+both, we suddenly spied a string of men defiling slowly down through
+the wide boulder desert on the other side.  We all rose and hailed
+them.  They were so far away that at first they failed to hear us,
+and even when they heard they stared vacantly about them like men who
+hear they know not what.  When at last they caught sight of us, we
+beckoned excitedly.  They consulted, apparently, and then one of them
+came down to the edge of the stream.  The torrent made so much noise
+that our men could make themselves intelligible only in part, and
+that by bawling at the top of their lungs.  Through the envoy, they
+invited the band to string themselves across the stream and so pass
+our things over.  The man shook his head.  We rose to fabulous sums
+and still he repeated his pantomime.  It then occurred to Yejiro that
+a certain place lower down might possibly be bridged, and beckoning
+to the man to follow, he led the way to the spot in mind.  A boulder,
+two-thirds way in stream, seemed to offer a pier.  He tried to shout
+his idea, but the roar of the torrent, narrow though it was, drowned
+his voice; so, writing on a piece of paper: "What will you take to
+build us a bridge?" he wrapped the paper round a stone and flung it
+over.  After reading this missive, the spokesman held a consultation
+with his friends and a bargain was struck.  For the huge sum of two
+yen (a dollar and a half), they agreed to build us a bridge, and at
+once set off up the mountain side for a tree.
+
+The men, it seemed, were a band of wood-cutters who had wintered,
+as was their custom, in a hut at Kurobe, which was this side of the
+Harinoki toge, and were just come out from their hibernation.
+They were now on their way to Ashikura, where they belonged, to
+report to their headman, obtain supplies and start to return on the
+after-morrow.  It was a two-days' journey either out or in.
+
+Bridges, therefore, came of their trade.  The distance across the
+boulder bed was considerable, and as they toiled slowly up the face
+of the opposite mountain, they looked like so many ants.  Picking out
+a trunk, they began to drag it down.  By degrees they got it to the
+river bed, and thence eventually to the edge of the stream.  To lay
+it was quite a feat of engineering.  With some pieces of drift-wood
+which they found lying about, they threw a span to the big boulder,
+and from the boulder managed to get the trunk across.  Then, with
+rope which they carried at their girdles, they lashed the whole
+together until they had patched up a very workmanlike affair.
+We trod across in triumph.  With praiseworthy care lest it should
+be swept away they then took the thing all down again.
+
+Such valuable people were not idly to be parted with.  Here was a
+rare chance to get guides.  When, however, we approached them on the
+point, they all proved so conscientious about going home first, that
+the attempt failed.  But they gave us some important information on
+the state of the streams ahead and the means of crossing them, and we
+separated with much mutual good-will.
+
+For my part I felt as if we had already arrived somewhere.  I little
+knew what lay beyond.  While I was plodding along in this blissfully
+ignorant state of mind, communing with a pipe, the path, which had
+frisked in and out for some time among the boulders, suddenly took it
+into its head to scale a cliff on the left.  It did this, as it
+seemed to me, without provocation, after a certain reckless fashion
+of its own.  The higher it climbed, the more foolhardy it got, till
+the down-look grew unpleasant.  Then it took to coquetting with the
+gulf on its right until, as I knew would happen, it lost its head
+completely and fell over the edge.  The gap had been spanned by a few
+loose boards.  Over the makeshift we all, one after the other,
+gingerly crawled, each waiting his turn, with the abyss gaping on his
+side, for the one in front to move on.
+
+We had not yet recovered from the shock when we came to another place
+not unlike the first.  Here again the path had given way, and a
+couple of logs had been lashed across the inner elbow of the cliff.
+We crossed this by balancing ourselves for the first two steps by the
+stump of a bush that jutted out from a crevice in the rock; for the
+next two we touched the cliff with the tips of our fingers; for the
+last two we balanced ourselves alone.
+
+For the time being the gods of high places had tempted us enough, for
+the path now descended again to the dry bed of the stream, and there
+for a certain distance tripped along in all soberness, giving me the
+chance to look about me.  The precipitous sides of the mountains that
+shut in the narrow valley were heavily masked in forest; and for some
+time past, the ravines that scored their sides had been patched with
+snow.  With each new mile of advance the patches grew larger and
+merged into one another, stretching toward the stream.  We now began
+to meet snow on the path.  In the mean time, from one cause and
+another, insensibly I fell behind.  The others passed on out of
+sight.
+
+The path, having lulled me into a confiding unconcern, started in
+seeming innocence of purpose to climb again.  Its ingenuousness but
+prefaced a malicious surprise.  For of a sudden, unmasking a corner,
+it presented itself in profile ahead, a narrow ledge notched in naked
+simplicity against the precipice.  Things look better slightly
+veiled; besides, it is more decent, even in a path.  In this case the
+shamelessness was earnest of the undoing.  For on reaching the point
+in view and turning it I stood confronted by a sight sorry indeed.
+The path beyond had vanished.  Far below, out of sight over the edge,
+lay the torrent; unscalable the cliff rose above; and a line of
+fossil footprints, leading across the face of the precipice in the
+debris, alone marked where the path had been.  Spectres they seemed
+of their former selves.  Crusoe could not have been more horrified
+than was I.
+
+Not to have come suggested itself as the proper solution, unfortunately
+an impracticable one, and being there, to turn back was inadmissible.
+So I took myself in hand and started.  For the first few steps I was
+far too much given up to considering possibilities.  I thought how a
+single misstep would end.  I could see my footing slip, feel the
+consciousness that I was gone, the dull thuds from point to point as
+what remained of me bounded beyond the visible edge down, down.  .  .
+And after that what!  How long before the porters missed me and came
+back in search?  Would there be any trace to tell what had befallen?
+And then Yejiro returning alone to Tokyo to report--lost on the
+Dragon peak!  Each time I almost felt my foot give way as I put it
+down, right before left, left before right.
+
+Then I realized that this inopportune flirting with fate must stop;
+that I must give over dallying with sensations, or it would soon be
+all over with me.  I was falling a prey to the native Lorelei--for
+all these spots in Japan have their familiar devils--subjectively, as
+befits a modern man.  I numbed sensibility as best I could and cared
+only to make each step secure.  Between the Nirvana within and the
+Nirvana below, it was a sorry hell.
+
+In mid-career the path made an attempt to recover, but relapsed to
+further footprints in the sand.  At last it descended to a brook.
+I knelt to drink, and on getting up again saw my pocket-handkerchief
+whisking merrily away down stream.  I gave chase, but in vain; for
+though it came to the surface once or twice to tantalize me it was
+gone before I could seize it.  So I gave over the pursuit, reflecting
+that, after all, it might have fared worse with me.  If the Lorelei
+had hoped to turn my head, I was well quit of my handkerchief for her
+only trophy.
+
+Shortly after this, the main stream divided into two, and the left
+branch, which we followed, led up to a gorge,--beyond a doubt the
+abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet.  I do not
+remember a landscape more ghastly.  Not a tree, not a blade of grass,
+not even decent earth in the whole prospect.  Apparently, the place
+had been flayed alive and sulphur had then been poured into the sore.
+Thirty years before a cataclysm had occurred here.  The side of one
+of the mountains had slid bodily into the valley.  The debris, by
+damming up the stream, caused a freshet, which swept everything
+before it and killed quantities of folk lower down the valley.
+The place itself has never recovered to this day.
+
+Although the stream here was a baby to the one below, it was large
+enough to be impassable to the natural man.  From our woodcutter
+friends, however, we had learned of the leavings of a bridge, upon
+which in due time we came, and putting the parts of it in place, we
+passed successfully over.
+
+We now began to enter the snow in good earnest, incipient glacier
+snow, treacherously honeycombed.  It made, however, more agreeable
+walking than the boulders.  The path had again become precipitous,
+and kept on mounting, till of a sudden it landed us upon an
+amphitheatral arena, dominated by high, jagged peaks.  One unbroken
+stretch of snow covered the plateau, and at the centre of the wintry
+winding-sheet a cluster of weather-beaten huts appealed pitiably to
+the eye.  They were the buildings of the Riuzanjita hot-springs; in
+summer a sort of secular monastery for pilgrims to the Dragon peak.
+They were tenanted now, we had been told, by a couple of watchmen.
+We struck out with freer strides, while the moon, which had by this
+time risen high enough to overtop the wall of peaks, watched us with
+an ashen face, as in single file we moved across the waste of level
+white.
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+Riuzanjita.
+
+We made for the main hut, a low, mouse-colored shanty fast asleep and
+deep drifted in snow.  The advance porter summoned the place, and the
+summons drew to what did for door a man as mouselike as his mansion.
+He had about him a subdued, monkish demeanor that only partially hid
+an alertness within,--a secular monk befitting the spot.  He showed
+himself a kindly body, and after he had helped the porters off with
+their packs, led the way into the room in which he and his mate
+hibernated.  It was a room very much in the rough; boards for walls,
+for ceiling, for floor, its only furnishing a fire.  It was the best
+of furnishing in our eyes, and we hasted to squat round it in a
+circle, in attitudes of extreme devotion, for it was bitter cold.
+The monkish watchman threw a handful more twigs on the embers, out of
+a cheerful hospitality to his guests.
+
+The fireplace was merely a hole in the floor, according to Japanese
+custom, and the smoke found its way out as best it could.  But there
+was very little of it; usually, indeed, there is none, for charcoal
+is the common combustible.  A cauldron hung, by iron bars jointed
+together, from the gloom above.  It was twilight in the room.
+Already the day without was fading fast, and even at high noon, none
+too much of it could find a way into the building, now half buried
+under the snow.  A second watchman sat muffled in shadow on the
+farther side of the fire.  He made his presence known, from time to
+time, by occasional sympathetic gutturals, or by the sudden glow of a
+bit of charcoal, which he took out of the embers with a pair of
+chopstick fire-irons to relight his pipe.  The talk naturally turned
+upon our expedition, with Yejiro for spokesman, and from that easily
+slid into the all-important question of guides.  Our inquiries on
+this head elicited nothing but doubt.  We tried at first to get the
+watchmen to go.  But this they positively refused to do.  They could
+not leave their charge, in the first place, they said; and for the
+second, they did not know the path.  We asked if there was no one who
+did.  There was a hunter, they said, near by who was by way of
+knowing the road.  A messenger was sent at once to fetch him.
+
+In the mean time, if they showed themselves skeptical about our
+future, they proved most sympathetic over our past.  Our description
+of the Friday footprints especially brought out much fellow-feeling.
+They knew the spot well, they said, and it was very bad.  In fact it
+was called the Oni ga Jo, or place of many devils, for its fearfulness.
+It would be better, they added, after the mountain opening on the
+tenth of June.
+
+"Mountain opening!" said I to Yejiro; "what is that?  Is it anything
+like the 'river opening'?" For the Japanese words seemed to imply not
+a physical, but a formal unlocking of the hills, like the annual
+religious rite upon the Sumidagawa in Tokyo.  Such, it appeared, it
+was.  For the tenth of June, he said, was the date of the
+mountain-climbing festival.  Yearly on that day all the sacred peaks
+are thrown open to a pious public for ascent.  A procession of
+pilgrims, headed by a flautist and a bellman, wend their way to the
+summit, and there encamp.  For three days the ceremony lasts, after
+which the mountains are objects of pilgrimage till the twenty-eighth
+day of August.  For the rest of the year the summits are held to be
+shut, the gods being then in conclave, to disturb whom were the
+height of impiety.  A pleasing coincidence of duty and pleasure, that
+the scaling of the peaks should be enjoined to pilgrims at the times
+of easiest ascent!  Preparatory to the procession all the paths of
+approach are repaired.  It was this repairing to which the watchmen
+referred and which concerned our secular selves.
+
+Our difficulties began to be explained.  We were very close to
+committing sacrilege.  We had had, it is true, no designs on the
+peaks, but were we wholly guiltless in attempting so much as the
+passes in this the close season?  Apparently not.  At all events,
+we were a month ahead of time in our visit, which in itself was of
+questionable etiquette.
+
+At this point the messenger sent to find the hunter returned without
+his man.  Evidently the hunter was a person who meant to stand well
+with his gods, or else he was himself a myth.
+
+Distraught in mind and restless in body, I got up and went out into
+the great snow waste.  The sunset afterglow was just fading into the
+moonshine.  The effect upon the pure white sheet before me was
+indescribably beautiful.  The warm tint of the last of day, as it
+waned, dissolved imperceptibly into the cold lustre of the night as
+if some alchemist were subtly changing the substance while he kept
+the form.  For a new spirit was slowly possessing itself of the very
+shapes that had held the old, and the snow looked very silent, very
+cold, very ghostly, glistening in its silver sheen.
+
+The sky was bitterly clear, inhumanly cold.  To call it frosty were
+to humanize it.  Its expanse stretched far more frozen than the
+frozen earth.  Indeed, the night sky is always awful.  For the most
+part, we forget it for the kindlier prospect of the cradling trees,
+and the whispers of the wind, and the perfumes of the fields, the
+sights and sounds that even in slumber stir with life; and the nearer
+thrust away the real horror of the far.  But the awe speaks with
+insistence when the foreground itself is dead.
+
+Shivering, I returned to the fire and human companionship.
+The conversation again rolled upon precipices, which it appeared
+were more numerous before than behind, and casualties among the
+woodcutters not unknown in consequence.  There was one place, they
+said, where, if you slipped, you went down a ri (two miles and a half).
+It was here a woodcutter had been lost three days before.  The ri
+must have been a flight of fancy, since it far exceeded the height of
+the pass above the sea.  But a handsome discount from the statement
+left an unpleasant balance to contemplate.
+
+This death had frightened one of the watchmen badly, as it may well
+have done.  The facts were these.  Separated from the hot springs of
+Riuzanjita by two passes lay a valley, uninhabited except for two
+bands of woodcutters, who had built themselves a couple of huts, one
+on either side the stream, in which they lived the year round.
+It was these huts that went by the name of Kurobe.  During the winter
+they were entirely cut off from the outside world.  As soon as
+practicable in the spring, a part of each band was accustomed to come
+out over the passes, descend to Ashikura, and return with provisions
+and money.
+
+Now this year, before the men in the valley had thought it time to
+attempt the passes, a solitary woodcutter came up to the hot springs
+from below, and, in spite of warning from the watchmen, started alone
+for Kurobe.  On the afternoon of the third day after his departure,
+the regular band turned up at Riuzanjita, having left Kurobe, it
+seemed, that morning.  They passed the night at the hot springs hut,
+and on being questioned by the watchmen about the man of three days
+before, they said they had heard of no such person.  It turned out,
+to the horror of both parties, that he had never reached Kurobe.
+It was only the night before we arrived that the woodcutters had been
+there, and the affair was still terribly fresh in the watchman's
+thoughts; in fact, it was the identical band that had built us our
+bridge.  These men were thoroughly equipped for snow-climbing and had
+come over safely; and yet, as it was, the head man of the other band
+at Kurobe had been afraid to cross with them, and had, instead, gone
+all the way round by the river and the sea, a very long and rough
+journey.  Fatal accidents, the watchmen said, were of yearly
+occurrence on the passes.
+
+And all this was only the way to Kurobe.  Beyond it lay the Harinoki
+toge.  That pass no one had yet crossed this year.  And at intervals
+during the talk the watchman repeated excitedly, as a sort of
+refrain, "It is impossible to go on,--it is impossible to go on."
+
+This talk, a part of which I understood, was not very heartening,
+following as it did the personal experience of the Oni ga Jo.
+The prospect began to look too uncertain in its conclusion and too
+certain in its premises to be inviting.  If professionals, properly
+accoutred, found crossing so dangerous a matter, the place was hardly
+one for unprovided amateurs.  These mountaineers were not tied
+together, but wore over their waraji, or straw sandals, a set of
+irons called kanakajiki.  We were shown some of them which had been
+left by the woodcutters against their return.  They were skeleton
+sandals, iron bands shod with three spikes.  They looked like
+instruments of torture from the Middle Ages, and indeed were said to
+be indispensable against backsliding.
+
+On the other hand, one Blondin feat over the Devil Place was enough
+for me.  To take it on the road rather than turn back was one thing,
+to start to take it in cold blood another.  I had had quite enough of
+balancing and doubt.  So I asked if there was no other way out.
+We might, they said, go to Arimine.
+
+"And how was the road?"
+
+"Oh, the road was good," they answered cheerily.
+
+"Could we get a guide?"
+
+Apparently we could not, for an awkward pause ensued until, after
+some suspense, the bigger of the two watchmen, he that sat in the
+shadow of the corner, volunteered to pilot us himself; and, he added,
+we should not have to start betimes, as the snow would not be fit to
+travel on till the sun had melted the crust.
+
+Upon this doubly comforting conclusion I bade them good-night,
+and betook me to the cell-like room allotted me to sleep.
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Over the Snow.
+
+When Yejiro pushed the shoji and the amado (night shutters) apart in
+the morning, he disclosed a bank of snow four feet deep; not a
+snowfall over night, but the relic of the winter.  I found myself in
+a snow grotto beyond which nothing was visible.  He then imparted to
+me the cheerful news that the watchman had changed his mind, and now
+refused to set out with us.  It was too late in the day to start, the
+man said, which, in view of his having informed us only the night
+before that the snow would not be fit to travel on till this very
+hour, was scarcely logical.  The trouble lay not in the way, but in
+the will.  The man had repented him of his promise.  Things look
+differently as certainties in the morning from what they do as
+possibilities overnight.  Fortunately he proved amenable to
+importunity, and finally consented to go.  His fellow was much
+worried, and followed him distressfully to the outer threshold;
+whence in perturbation of spirit he watched us depart, calling out
+pathetically to his mate to be very careful of himself.  His almost
+motherly solicitude seemed to me more comical at the time than it
+came to seem later.
+
+The sky was without a fleck of cloud, and, as we struck out across
+the snow, I feared at first for my eyes, so great was the glare.
+For I had neither goggles nor veil.  In fact, we were as unprepared a
+troop as ever started on such an expedition.  We had not a pair of
+foot spikes nor a spiked pole to the lot of us.
+
+The jagged peaks of the valley's wall notched the sky in vivid
+relief, their sharp teeth biting the blue.  We below were blinking.
+Luckily before very long we had crossed the level and were attacking
+the wall, and once on it the glare lessened, for we were facing the
+south, and the slant of the slope took off from the directness of the
+sun's rays.  The higher we rose, the greater the tilt became.  The
+face of the slope was completely buried in snow except where the
+aretes stuck through, for the face was well wrinkled.  The angle soon
+grew unpleasant to visage, and certainly looked to have exceeded the
+limit of stable equilibrium.  In mid-ascent, as we were winding
+cautiously up, a porter slipped.  He stopped himself, however, and
+was helped on to his feet again by his fellow behind.  The bad bit
+was preface to a worse effect round the corner, for on turning the
+arete, we came upon a snow slope like a gigantic house-roof.  It was
+as steep as you please, and disappeared a few hundred feet below over
+the edge into the abyss.  Across and up this the guide, after looking
+about him, struck out, and I followed.  The snow was in a plastic
+state, and at each step I kicked my toes well in, so wedging my
+footing.  The view down was very unnerving.  It soon grew so bad I
+fixed my thought solely on making each step secure, and went slowly,
+which was much against my inclination.  In this manner we tacked
+gradually upward in zigzags, some forty feet apart, each of us
+improving the footprints of his predecessor.
+
+After a short eternity, we came out at the top.  I threw myself upon
+the snow, and when I had sufficiently recovered my breath asked the
+guide, with what I meant for sarcasm, whether that was his idea of
+"a good road." He owned that it was the worst bit on the way, but he
+somewhat grudgingly conceded it a "gake." I sat corrected, but in the
+interest of any future wanderer I submit the following definition of
+a "gake," which, if not strictly accurate, at least leans to the
+right side.  If the cliff overhang, it is a "gake;" but if a plumb
+line from the top fall anywhere within the base, it is no longer a
+"gake," but "a good road."
+
+On the other side the slope was more hospitable.  Even trees wintered
+just below the crest, their great gaunt trunks thrust deep into the
+snow.  We glissaded down the first few hundred feet, till we brought
+up standing at the head of an incipient gorge, likewise smothered in
+snow.  Round the boles of the trees the snow had begun to thaw, which
+gave me a chance to measure its depth, by leaning over the rim of the
+cup and thrusting my pole down as far as I could reach.  The point of
+it must have been over seven feet from the surface, and it touched no
+bottom.  My investigations took time enough to put a bend of the
+hollow between me and the others, and when at last I looked up they
+were nowhere to be seen.  As I trudged after them alone I felt like
+that coming historical character, the last man on our then frozen
+earth.
+
+For some minutes past a strange, far-away musical note, like the
+murmur of running water, had struck my ear, and yet all about
+everything looked dead.  Of animate or even inanimate pulsation there
+was no sign.  One unbroken sheet of snow stretched as far as I could
+see, in which stood the great trees like mummies.  Still the sound
+continued, seeming to come from under my feet.  I stopped, and,
+kneeling down, put my ear to the crust, and there, as distinct as
+possible, I heard the wimpling of a baby brook, crooning to itself
+under its thick white blanket.  Here then was the cradle of one of
+those streams that later would become such an ugly customer to meet.
+It was babily innocent now, and the one living thing beside myself on
+this May day in the great snow-sheeted solitude.
+
+Perhaps it was the brook that had undermined the snow.  At all events,
+soon after I overtook the others, the guide, fearing to trust to it
+farther, suddenly struck up again to the left.  We all followed,
+remonstrating.  We had no sooner got up than we went down again the
+other side, and this picket-fence style of progress continued till we
+emerged upon the top of a certain spur, which commanded a fine view
+of gorges.  Unfortunately we ourselves were on top of some of them.
+The guide reconnoitered both sides for a descent, pushing his way
+through a thick growth of dwarf bamboo, and brought up each time on
+the edge of an impassable fall to the stream below.  At last he took
+to the arete.  It was masked by trees for some distance, and then
+came out as a bare knife edge of rock and earth.  Down it we
+scrambled, till the slope to the side became passable.  This was now
+much less steep, although still steep enough for the guide to make me
+halt behind a tree, for fear of the stones dislodged by those behind.
+These came down past us like cannon-balls, ricochetting by big
+bounds.
+
+At the bottom we reached the stream, and beside it we halted for
+lunch.  Just below our resting place another stream joined our own,
+both coming down forbidding-looking valleys, shut in by savage peaks.
+On the delta, between the waters, we made out a band of hunters,
+three of them, tarrying after an unsuccessful chase.  This last was a
+general inference, rather than an observed fact.
+
+The spot was ideal for picturesque purposes,--the water clear as
+crystal, and the sunshine sparkling.  But otherwise matters went ill
+with us.  Our extempore guide had promised us, over his own fire the
+evening before, a single day of it to Arimine.  On the road his
+estimate of the time needed had increased alarmingly.  From direct
+questioning it now appeared that he intended to camp out on the
+mountain opposite, whose snowy slopes were painfully prophetic of
+what that night would be.  Besides, this meant another day of it to
+Arimine; and even when we reached Arimine, we were nowhere, and I was
+scant of time.  We had already lost three days; if we kept on, I
+foresaw the loss of more.  It was very disheartening to turn back,
+but it had to be done.
+
+Our object now was to strike the Ashikura trail and follow it down.
+The guide, however, was not sure of the path, so we hailed the
+hunters.  One of them came across the delta to the edge of the stream
+within shouting distance, and from him we obtained knowledge of the
+way.
+
+At first the path was unadventurous enough, though distressingly
+rough.  In truth, it was no path at all; it was an abstract
+direction.  It led straight on, regardless of footing, and we
+followed, now wading through swamps, now stumbling over roots, now
+ducking from whip-like twigs that cut us across the face, until at
+last we emerged above the stream, and upon a scene as grandly
+desolate as the most morbid misanthrope might wish.  A mass of
+boulders of all sizes, from a barn to a cobblestone, completely
+filled a chasm at the base of a semicircular wall of castellated clay
+cliffs.  Into the pit we descended.  The pinnacles above were
+impressively high, and between them were couloirs of debris that
+looked to us to be as perpendicular as the cliffs.  Up one of these
+breakneck slides the guide pointed for our path.  Porters and all,
+we demurred.  Path, of course, there was none; there was not even an
+apology for a suspicion that any one had ever been up or down the
+place.  We felt sure there must be some other way out.  The more we
+searched, however, the less we found.  The stream, which was an
+impassable torrent, barred exit below on our side by running straight
+into the wall of rock.  The slide was an ugly climb to contemplate,
+yet we looked at it some time before we accepted the inevitable.
+
+When in desperation we finally made up our minds, we began picking
+our dubious way up among a mass of rocks that threatened to become a
+stone avalanche at any moment.  None of us liked it, but none of us
+knew how little the others liked it till that evening.  In the
+expansion of success we admitted our past feelings.  One poor porter
+said he thought his last hour had come, and most of us believed a
+near future without us not improbable.  It shows how danger unlocks
+the heart that just because, halfway up, I had relieved this man of
+his stick, which from a help had become a hindrance, he felt toward
+me an exaggerated gratitude.  It was nothing for me to do, for I was
+free, while he had his load, but had I really saved his life he could
+not have been more beholden.  Indeed, it was a time to intensify
+emotion.
+
+As we scrambled upward on all fours, the ascent, from familiarity,
+grew less formidable.  At least the stones decreased in size,
+although their tilt remained the same, but the angle looked less
+steep from above than from below.
+
+At last, one after the other, we reached a place to the side of the
+neck of the couloir, and scrambling round the coping of turf at the
+top emerged, to our surprise, upon a path, or rather upon the ghost
+of one.  For we found ourselves upon a narrow ridge of soil between
+two chasms, ending in a pinnacle of clay, and along this ribbon of
+land ran a path, perfectly preserved for perhaps a score of paces
+out, when it broke off bodily in mid-air.  The untoward look of the
+way we had come stood explained.  Here clearly had been a cataclysm
+within itinerary times.  Some gigantic landslide must have sliced the
+mountain off into the gorge below, and instead of a path we had been
+following its still unlaid phantom.  The new-born character of the
+chasm explained its shocking nakedness.  But it was an uncomfortable
+sight to see a path in all its entirety vanish suddenly into the
+void.
+
+The uncut end of the former trail led back to a little tableland
+supporting a patch of tilling and tenanted by an uninhabited hut.
+The Willow Moor they called it, though it seemed hardly big enough to
+bear a name.  On reconnoitring for the descent, we found the farther
+side fallen away like the first; so that the plateau was now cut off
+from all decent approach.  One of us, at last, struck the butt end of
+a path; but we had not gone far down it before it broke off, and
+delivered us to the gullies.  This side, however, was much better
+than the other, and it took none of us very long to slip down the
+slope, repair the bridge, and join the Ashikura trail.
+
+We were now once more on the path we had come up, with the certainty
+of bad places instead of their uncertainty ahead of us, a doubtful
+betterment.  The Oni ga Jo lay in wait round the corner, and the rest
+of the familiar devils would all appear in due course of time.
+
+Tied over my boots were the straw sandals of the country.  They were
+not made to be worn thus, and showed great uneasiness in their new
+position, do what we might with the thongs.  Everybody tried his hand
+at it, first and last; but the fidgety things always ended by coming
+off at the toe or the heel, or sluing round to the side till they
+were worse than useless.  They were supposed to prevent one from
+slipping, which no doubt they would have done had they not begun by
+slipping off themselves.  They wore themselves out by their nervousness,
+and had to be renewed every little while from the stock the porters
+carried.  In honor of the Oni ga Jo I had a fresh pair put on beside
+the brook sacred to the memory of my pocket-handkerchief.  We then
+rose to the Devil Place, and threaded it in single file.  Whether it
+were the companionship, or familiarity, or simply that my right side
+instead of my left next the cliff gave greater seeming security, I
+got over it a shade more comfortably this time, though it was still
+far from my ideal of an afternoon's walk.  The road to the next world
+branched off too disturbingly to the left.
+
+At last the path descended to the river bottom for good.  I sat down
+on a stone, pulled out my tobacco pouch, and lit a pipe.  The porters
+passed on out of sight.  Then I trudged along myself.  The tension of
+the last two days had suddenly ceased, and in the expansion of spirit
+that ensued I was conscious of a void.  I wanted some one with me then,
+perhaps, more than I ever craved companionship before.  The great
+gorge about me lay filled to the brim with purple shadow.  I drank in
+the cool shade-scented air at every breath.  The forest-covered
+mountain sides, patched higher up with snow in the gullies, shut out
+the world.  Only a gilded bit here and there on some lofty spur
+lingered to hint a sun beyond.  The strip of pale blue sky far
+overhead bowed to meet the vista of the valley behind, a vista of
+peaks more and more snow-clad, till the view was blocked at last by
+a white, nun-veiled summit, flushed now, in the late afternoon light,
+to a tender rose.  Past strain had left the spirit, as past fatigue
+leaves the body, exquisitely conscious; and my fancy came and walked
+with me there in that lonely valley, as it gave itself silently into
+the arms of night.
+
+Probably none I know will ever tread where I was treading then, nor I
+ever be again in that strange wild cleft, so far out of the world;
+and yet, if years hence I should chance to wander there alone once
+more, I know the ghost of that romance will rise to meet me as I pass.
+
+I own I made no haste to overtake the caravan.
+
+Darkness fell upon us while we were yet a long way from Ashikura,
+with an uncertain cliff path between us and it: for the path, like a
+true mountain trail, had the passion for climbing developed into a
+mania, and could never rest content with the river's bed whenever it
+spied a chance to rise.  It had just managed an ascent up a zigzag
+stairway of its own invention, and had stepped out in the dark upon a
+patch of tall mountain grass, as dry as straw, when Yejiro conceived
+the brilliant idea of torches.  He had learned the trick in the
+Hakone hills, where it was the habit, he told the guide, when caught
+out at night; and he proceeded to roll some of the grass into long
+wisps for the purpose.  The torches were remarkably picturesque, and
+did us service beside.  Their ruddy flare, bowing to the breeze, but
+only burning the more madly for its thwarting, lighted the path like
+noonday through a circle of fifteen feet, and dropped brands, still
+flaring, into the stubble, which we felt it a case of conscience to
+stop and stamp out.  The circle, small as it was, sufficed to
+disclose a yawning gulf on the side, to which the path clung with the
+persistency of infatuation.
+
+The first thing to tell us of approach to human habitation was the
+croaking of the frogs.  After the wildness of our day it sounded like
+some lullaby of Mother Earth, speaking of hearth and home, and we
+knew that we were come back to ricefields and man.  It was another
+half hour, however, before our procession reached the outskirts of
+the village.  Here we threw aside our torches, and in a weary,
+drawn-out file found our way, one by one, into the courtyard of the
+inn.  It was not an inn the year round; it became such only at
+certain seasons, of which the present was not one.  It had the habit
+of putting up pilgrims on their way to the Dragon Peak; between the
+times of its pious offices it relapsed into a simple farmhouse.
+But the owner received us none the less kindly for our inopportune
+appearance, and hasted to bring the water-tubs for our feet.  Never
+was I more willing to sit on the sill a moment and dabble my toes;
+for I was footsore and weary, and glad to be on man's level again.
+I promise you, we were all very human that evening, and felt a deal
+aloud.
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+A Genial Inkyo.
+
+The owner of the farmhouse had inherited it from his father.  There
+was nothing very odd about this even to our other-world notions of
+property, except that the father was still living, as hale and hearty
+as you please, in a little den at the foot of the garden.  He was, in
+short, what is known as an inkyo, or one "dwelling in retirement,"--a
+singular state, composed of equal parts of this world and the next;
+like dying in theory, and then undertaking to live on in practice.
+For an inkyo is a man who has formally handed in his resignation to
+the community, and yet continues to exist most enjoyably in the midst
+of it.  He has abdicated in favor of his eldest son, and, having put
+off all responsibilities, is filially supported in a life of ease and
+pleasure.
+
+In spite of being no longer in society, the father was greedily social.
+As soon as he heard a foreigner had arrived, he trotted over to call,
+and nothing would do but I must visit his niche early in the morning,
+before going away.
+
+After breakfast, therefore, the son duly came to fetch me, and we
+started off through the garden.  For his sire's place of retirement
+lay away from the road, toward the river, that the dear old gentleman
+might command a view of the peaks opposite, of one of which, called
+the Etchiu Fuji, from its conical form, he was dotingly fond.
+
+It was an expedition getting there.  This arose, not from any special
+fault in the path, which for the first half of the way consisted of a
+string of stepping-stones neatly laid in the ground, and for the
+latter fraction of no worse mud than could easily be met with
+elsewhere.  The trouble came from a misunderstanding in foot-gear.
+It seemed too short a walk to put one's boots twice on and off for
+the doing of it.  On the other hand, to walk in stocking-feet was out
+of the question, for the mud.  So I attempted a compromise,
+consisting of my socks and the native wooden clogs, and tried to make
+the one take kindly to the other.  But my mittenlike socks would have
+none of my thongs, and, failing of a grip for my toes, compelled me
+to scuffle along in a very undignified way.  Then every few steps one
+or the other of the clogs saw fit to stay behind, and I had to halt
+to recover the delinquent.  I made a sorry spectacle as I screwed
+about on the remaining shoe, groping after its fellow.  Once I was
+caught in the act by my cicerone, who turned round inopportunely to
+see why I was not following; and twice in attempting the feat I all
+but lost my balance into the mud.
+
+The worthy virtuoso, as he was, met us at the door, and escorted us
+upstairs to see his treasures.  The room was tapestried with all
+manner of works of art, of which he was justly proud, while the house
+itself stood copied from a Chinese model, for he was very classic.
+But I was pleased to find that above all his heart was given to the
+view.  It was shared, as I also discovered, by the tea-ceremonies, in
+which he was a proficient; such a mixture is man.  But I believe the
+view to have been the deeper affection.  While I was admiring it, he
+fetched from a cupboard a very suspicious-looking bottle of what
+turned out to be honey, and pressed a glass of it upon me.  I duly
+sipped this not inappropriate liquor, since cordials savor of
+asceticism, and this one being of natural decoction peculiarly
+befitted a secular anchorite.  Then I took my leave of one who,
+though no longer in the world, was still so charmingly of it.
+
+The good soul chanced to be a widower, but such bereavement is no
+necessary preliminary to becoming a "dweller in retirement."
+Sometimes a man enters the inkyo state while he still has with him
+the helpmate of his youth, and the two go together to this aftermath
+of life.  Surely a pretty return, this, of the honeymoon!  Darby and
+Joan starting once more hand in hand, alone in this Indian summer of
+their love, as they did years ago in its spring-tide, before other
+generations of their own had pushed them on to less romantic parts;
+Darby come back from paternal cares to be once more the lover, and
+Joan from mother and grandam again become his girl.
+
+We parted from our watchman-guide and half our porters with much
+feeling, as did they from us.  As friendships go we had not known one
+another long, but intimacy is not measured by time.  Circumstances
+had thrown us into one another's arms, and, as we bade good-by first
+to one and then to another, we seemed to be severing a tie that
+touched very near the heart.
+
+Two of the porters came on with us, as much for love as for money,
+as far as Kamiichi, where we were to get kuruma.  A long tramp we had
+of it across leagues of ricefields, and for a part of the way beside a
+large, deep canal, finely bowered in trees, and flowing with a swift,
+dark current like some huge boa winding stealthily under the bamboo.
+It was the artery to I know not how many square miles of field.
+We came in for a steady drizzle after this, and it was long past noon
+before we touched our noontide halt, and stalked at last into the inn.
+
+With great difficulty we secured three kuruma,--the place stood on
+the limits of such locomotion,--and a crowd so dense collected about
+them that it blocked the way out.  Everybody seemed smitten with a
+desire to see the strangers, which gave the inn servants, by virtue
+of their calling, an enviable distinction to village eyes.  But the
+porters stood highest in regard, both because of their more intimate
+tie to us and because we here parted from them.  It was severing the
+final link to the now happy past.  We all felt it, and told our
+rosary of memories in thought, I doubt not, each to himself, as we
+went out into the world upon our different ways.
+
+Eight miles in a rain brought us to the road by which we had entered
+Etchiu some days before, and that night we slept at Mikkaichi once
+more.  On the morrow morning the weather faired, and toward midday we
+were again facing the fringe of breakers from the cliffs.
+The mountain spurs looked the grimmer that we now knew them so well by
+repulse.  The air was clearer than when we came, and as we gazed out
+over the ocean we could see for the first half day the faint coast
+line of Noto, stretching toward us like an arm along the horizon.
+We watched it at intervals as long as it was recognizable, and when
+at last it vanished beyond even imagination's power to conjure up,
+felt a strange pang of personal regret.  The sea that snatches away
+so many lands at parting seems fitly inhuman to the deed.
+
+In the course of these two days two things happened which pointed
+curiously to the isolation of this part of Japan.  The first was the
+near meeting with another foreigner, which would seem to imply
+precisely the contrary.  But the unwonted excitement into which the
+event threw Yejiro and me was proof enough of its strangeness.
+It was while I was sipping tea, waiting for a fresh relay of kuruma at
+Namerigawa, that Yejiro rushed in to announce that another foreigner
+was resting at an inn a little further up town.  He had arrived
+shortly before from the Echigo side, report said.  The passing of
+royalty or even a circus would have been tame news in comparison.
+Of course I hastened into my boots and sallied forth.  I did not call
+on him formally, but I inspected the front of the inn in which he was
+said to be, with peculiar expectation of spirit, in spite of my
+affected unconcern.  He was, I believe, a German; but he never took
+shape.
+
+The second event occurred the next evening, and was even more singular.
+Like the dodo it chronicled survival.  It was manifested in the
+person of a policeman.
+
+Some time after our arrival at the inn Yejiro reported that the
+police officer wished to see me.  The man had already seen the
+important part of me, the passport, and I was at a loss to imagine
+what more he could want.  So Yejiro was sent back to investigate.
+He returned shortly with a sad case of concern for consideration,
+and he hardly kept his face as he told it.  The conscientious officer,
+it seemed, wished to sleep outside my room for my protection.
+From the passport he felt himself responsible for my safety, and had
+concluded that the least he could do would be not to leave me for a
+moment.  I assured him, through Yejiro, that his offer was most
+thoughtful, but unnecessary.  But what an out-of-the-world corner the
+thought implied, and what a fine fossil the good soul must have been!
+Here was survival with an emphasis!  The man had slept soundly through
+twenty years or more of change, and was still in the pre-foreign days
+of the feudal ages.
+
+The prices of kuruma, too, were pleasingly behind the times.  They
+were but two-fifths of what we should have had to pay on the southern
+coast.  As we advanced toward Shinshiu, however, the prices advanced
+too.  Indeed, the one advance accurately measured the other.  We were
+getting back again into the world, it was painfully evident.  At last
+fares rose to six cents a ri.  Before they could mount higher we had
+taken refuge in the train, and were hurrying toward Zenkoji by steam.
+
+Our objective point was now the descent of the Tenriugawa rapids.
+It was not the shortest way home, but it was part of our projected
+itinerary and took us through a country typical of the heart of
+Japan.  It began with a fine succession of passes.  These I had once
+taken on a journey years before with a friend, and as we started now
+up the first one, the Saru ga Bamba no toge, I tried to make the new
+impression fit the old remembrance.  But man had been at work upon
+the place without, and imagination still more upon its picture
+within.  It was another toge we climbed in the light of that
+latter-day afternoon.  With the companion the old had passed away.
+
+Leaving the others to follow, I started down the zigzags on the
+farther side.  It was already dusk, and the steepness of the road and
+the brisk night air sent me swinging down the turns with something of
+the anchor-like escapement of a watch.  Midway I passed a solitary
+pedestrian, who was trolling to himself down the descent; and when in
+turn he passed me, as I was waiting under a tree for the others to
+catch up, he eyed me suspiciously, as one whose wanderings were
+questionable.  They were certainly questionable to myself, for by
+that time we were come to habitations, and each fresh light I saw I
+took for the village where we were to stop for the night, in spite of
+repeated disillusionings.
+
+Overhead, the larger stars came out and winked at me, and then, as
+the fields of space became more and more lighted with star-points,
+the hearth-fires to other homes of worlds, I thought how local, after
+all, is the great cone of shadow we men call night; for it is only
+nature's nightcap for the nodding earth, as she turns her head away
+from the sun to lie pillowed in space.
+
+The next day was notable chiefly for the up-and-down character of the
+country even for Japan; which was excelled only by the unhesitating
+acceptance of it on the part of the road, and this in its turn only
+by the crowds that traveled it.  It seemed that the desire to go
+increased inversely as the difficulty in going.  The wayfarers were
+most sociable folk, and for a people with whom personality is at a
+discount singularly given to personalities.  Not a man who had a
+decent chance but asked whither we were going and whence we had come.
+To the first half of the country-side we confided so much of our
+private history; to the second we contented ourselves in saying, with
+elaborate courtesy, "The same as six years ago," an answer which
+sounded polite, and rendered the surprised questioner speechless for
+the time we took to pass.
+
+Especially the women added to the picturesqueness of the landscape.
+Their heads done up in gay-colored kerchiefs, framing their round and
+rosy faces, their kit slung over their shoulders, and their kimono
+tucked in at their waists, they trudged along on useful pairs of
+ankles neatly cased in lavender gaiters.  Some followed dutifully
+behind their husbands; others chatted along in company with their
+kind,--members these last of some pilgrim association.
+
+There were wayfarers, too, of less happy mind.  For over the last
+pass the authorities were building a new road, and long lines of
+pink-coated convicts marched to and fro at work upon it, under the
+surveillance of the dark-blue police; and the sight made me think how
+little the momentary living counts in the actual life.  Here we were,
+two sets of men, doing for the time an identical thing, trudging
+along a mountain path in the fresh May air; and yet to the one the
+day seemed all sunshine, to the other nothing but cloud.
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+Our Passport and the Basha.
+
+It was bound to come, and we knew it; it was only a question of time.
+But then we had braved the law so far so well, we had almost come to
+believe that we should escape altogether.  I mean the fatal detection
+by the police that we were violating my passport.  That document had
+already outrun the statute of limitations, and left me no better than
+an outlaw.  For practical purposes my character was gone, and being
+thus self-convicted I might be arrested at any moment!
+
+In consequence of pending treaty negotiations the government had
+become particular about the privileges it granted.  One of the first
+counter-moves to foreign insistence on exterritoriality was the
+restricting of passports to a fortnight's time.  You might lay out
+any tour you chose, and if granted by the government, the provinces
+designated would all be duly inscribed in your passport, but you had
+to compass them all in the fortnight or be punished.  Of course this
+could be evaded, and a Japanese friend in the foreign office had
+kindly promised to send me an extension on telegraph.  But the
+dislike of being tied to times and places made me sinfully prefer the
+risk of being marched back to Tokyo under the charge of a policeman,
+a fate I had seen overtake one or two other malefactors caught at
+somewhat different crimes, whom we had casually met on the road.
+The Harinoki toge was largely to blame for the delay, it is true.
+But then unluckily the Harinoki toge could not be arrested, and I could.
+
+The bespectacled authorities who examined my credentials every night
+had hitherto winked at my guilt, so that the bolt fell upon us from a
+clear sky.  It is almost questionable whether it had a right to fall
+at that moment at all.  It was certainly a case of officious
+officialdom.  For we had stopped simply to change kuruma, and the
+unwritten rule of the road runs that so long as the traveler keeps
+moving he is safe.  To catch him napping at night is the recognized
+custom.
+
+Besides, the police might have chosen, even by day, some other
+opportunity to light upon us than in the very thick of our wrestle
+with the extortionate prices of fresh kuruma.  It was inconsiderate
+of them, to say the least; for the attack naturally threw us into a
+certain disrepute not calculated to cheapen fares.  Then, too, our
+obvious haste helped furnish circumstantial evidence of crime.
+
+Nevertheless, in the very midst of these difficult negotiations at
+Matsumoto, evil fate presented itself, clothed as a policeman, and
+demanded our papers.  Luckily they were not at the very bottom of the
+baggage, but in Yejiro's bosom; for otherwise our effects would have
+become a public show, and collected an even greater crowd than
+actually gathered.  The arm of the law took the passport, fell at
+once on the indefensible date, and pointed it out to us.  There we
+were, caught in the act.  We sank several degrees instantly in
+everybody's estimation.
+
+How we escaped is a secret of the Japanese force; for escape we did.
+We admitted our misfortune to the policeman, and expressed ourselves
+as even more desirous of getting back to Tokyo than he could be to
+have us there.  But we pointed out that now the Tenriugawa was to all
+intents as short a way as any, and furthermore that it was the one
+expressly nominated in the bond.  The policeman stood perplexed.
+Out of doubt or courtesy, or both, he hesitated for some moments,
+and then reluctantly handed the passport back.  We stood acquitted.
+Indeed we were not only suffered to proceed, and that in our own way,
+but he actually accelerated matters himself, for he turned to against
+the kuruma, to their instant discomfiture.  Indeed, this was quite as
+it should be, for he was as anxious to be rid of us as we were to be
+quit of him.
+
+On the road the kuruma proved unruly.  The exposure we had sustained
+may have helped to this, or the coercion of the policeman may have
+worked revolt.  They jogged along more and more reluctantly, till,
+at last, the worst of them refused to go on at all.  After some quite
+useless altercation, we made what shift we might with the remainder,
+but had not got far when we heard the toot of a fish-horn behind,
+and the sound gradually overhauled us.  Now, a fish-horn on a country
+road in Japan means a basha, and a basha means the embodiment of the
+objectionable.  It is a vehicle to be avoided; both externally like a
+fire-engine, and internally like an ambulance or a hearse.  Indeed,
+so far as its victim is concerned, it usually ends by becoming a
+cross between the latter two.  It is a machine absolutely devoid of
+recommendations.  I speak from experience, for in a moment of
+adventure I once took passage in one, some years ago, and I never
+mean to do so again.  Even the sound of its fish-horn now provokes me
+to evil thoughts.  But we were in a bad way, and, to my wonder,
+I found my sentiments perceptibly softening.  Before the thing caught
+up with us, I had actually resolved to take it.
+
+We made signals of distress, and, rather contrary to my expectation,
+the machine stopped.  The driver pulled up, and the guard, a
+half-grown boy, who sat next him on the seat in front, making melody
+on the horn, jumped down, a strange bundle of consequence and
+courtesy, and helped us and our belongings in.  He then swung himself
+into his seat, as the basha set off again, and fell to tooting
+vociferously.  We had scarce got settled before the vehicle was
+dashing along at what seemed, to our late perambulator experience,
+a perfectly breakneck speed.  The pace and the enthusiasm of the boy
+infected us.  Yejiro and I fell to congratulating each other, with
+some fervor, on our change of conveyance, and each time we spoke,
+the boy whisked round in his seat and cried out, with a knowing wag of
+his head, "I tell you, it's fast, a basha! He!" and then as suddenly
+whisked back again, and fell to tooting with renewed vigor, like one
+who had been momentarily derelict in duty.  The road was quite deserted,
+so that so much noise would have seemed unnecessary.  The boy thought
+otherwise.  Meanwhile, we were being frightfully jolted, and
+occasionally slung round corners in a way to make holding on a
+painful labor.
+
+I suppose the unwonted speed must have intoxicated us.  There is
+nothing else that will account for our loss of head.  For, before we
+were well out of the machine, we had begun negotiations for its
+exclusive possession on the morrow; and by the time we were fairly
+installed in the inn at Shiwojiri, the bargain stood complete.
+In consideration of no exorbitant sum, the vehicle, with all
+appertaining thereto, was to be taken off its regular route and
+wander, like any tramp, at our sweet will, in quite a contrary
+direction.  The boy with the horn was expressly included in the
+lease.  By this arrangement we hoped to compass two days' journey in
+one, and reach by the morrow's night the point where boats are taken
+for the descent of the Tenriugawa rapids.  We knew the drive would be
+painful, but we had every promise that it would be fast.
+
+The inn at Shiwojiri possessed a foreign table and chairs; a bit of
+furnishing from which the freshness of surprise never wore off.  What
+was even less to be looked for, the son of the house was proficient
+in English, having studied with a missionary in Tokyo.  I had some
+talk with him later, and lent him an English classic which he showed
+great desire to see.
+
+Betimes the next morning the basha appeared, both driver and guard
+got up in a fine dark-green uniform, a spruceness it much tickled our
+vanity to mark.  With a feeling akin to princely pride we stepped in,
+the driver cracked his whip, and, amid the bows of the inn household,
+we went off up the street.  Barring the loss of an umbrella, which
+had happened somewhere between the time we boarded the basha on the
+yestereen and the hour of departure that morning, and an exhaustive
+but vain hunt for the same, first in the vehicle and then at the
+stables, nothing marred the serenity of our first half hour.  The sky
+was dreamy; a delicate blue seen through a golden gauze.  I fancy it
+was such a sky with which Danae fell in love.  We rose slowly up the
+Shiwojiri pass, which a new road enabled even the basha to do quite
+comfortably; and the southern peaks of the Hida-Shinshiu range rose
+to correspond across the valley, the snow line distinctly visible,
+though the nearer ranges did their best to cut it off.  Norikura, the
+Saddle, especially, showed a fine bit of its ten thousand feet,
+wrapped in the indistinctness of the spring haze.  The heavy air gave
+a look of slumber to the peaks, as if those summits, waked before the
+rest of the world, had already grown drowsy.  We had not yet ceased
+gazing at them when a turn of the road shut them out.  A rise of a
+few feet, a dip, a turn, and the lake of Suwa lay below us on the
+other side, flanked by its own mountains, through a gap in which
+showed the just perceptible cone of Fuji.
+
+The Shiwojiri toge is not a high pass, and yet it does duty as part
+of a great divide.  A drop of water, falling on the Shiwojiri side,
+if it chance to meet with other drops before it be snatched up again
+into the sky, wanders into the sea of Japan; while its fellow, coming
+to earth not a yard away, ends at last in the Pacific ocean.  Our way
+now lay with the latter.  For the Tenriugawa, or River of the
+Heavenly Dragon, takes its rise in the lake of Suwa, a bowl of water
+a couple of miles or more across.  It trickles out insignificantly
+enough at one end; gathers strength for fifty miles of flow, and then
+for another hundred cuts its way clean across a range of mountains.
+How it ever got through originally, and why, are interesting
+mysteries.  Its gorge is now from one to two thousand feet deep,
+cleft, not through a plateau, but through the axis of a mountain
+chain.  In most places there is not a yard to spare.
+
+We were still a doubtful day off from where it is customary to take a
+boat.  We had started somewhat late, stopped for the lack of umbrella,
+and now were committed to a digression for letters I expected at
+Shimonosuwa.  I never order my letters to meet me on the line of
+march but I bitterly repent having chosen that special spot.
+There is always some excellent reason why it turns out most
+inconvenient.  But as yet I was hopeful, for I thought I knew the
+speed of the basha, and the day was still young.
+
+The day had grown older and I wiser by the time my letters were read,
+with their strange perfume from outre-mer, the horses harnessed
+afresh, and we under way once more, clattering down the main street
+of the village.  It was not only in the village that we made a stir.
+A basha is equal to the occasion anywhere.  The whole countryside
+stopped in its tracks to turn and stare as we passed, and at one
+point we came in for a perfect ovation; for our passage and the
+noonday recess of a school happening to coincide, the children,
+at that moment let loose, instantly dashed after us pell-mell, in a
+mass, shouting.  One or two of them were so eager in the chase that
+they minded not where they went, and, tripping over stones or ruts,
+fell headlong in the mud.  The rest pursued us panting, each
+according to his legs, and gave over at last only for want of wind.
+
+The guard was supremely happy.  What time the upper half of him was
+too tired to toot the lower half spent in hopping off his seat and on
+again upon imaginary duty.  Meanwhile, in spite of enlivenments not
+included in the bill, my old dislike was slowly but surely coming
+back.  I began to be uneasy on the score of time.  The speed was not
+what hope and the company had led me to expect.  I went through some
+elaborate rule-of-three calculation between the distance, the speed,
+and the time; and, as far as I could make out, it began to look
+questionable whether we should arrive that night at all.  I had
+already played the part of goad out of precaution; I now had to take
+to it in good earnest,--futiley, to boot.  Meanwhile my body was as
+uneasy as my mind.  In the first place, the seats faced sideways, so
+that we progressed after the fashion of crabs.  Secondly, the vehicle
+hardly made apologies for springs.  We were rattled about like
+parched corn in a hopper.
+
+What a blessed trick of memory that, of winnowing the joys of travel
+from its discomforts, and letting the latter slip unconsciously away!
+The dust and the heat and the thousand petty annoyances pass with the
+fact to be forgotten, while the snow-hooded mountains and the deep
+blue sky and the smiling fields stay with us, a part of ourselves.
+That drive seems golden as I look back upon it; yet how sadly
+discomforting it was at the time!
+
+Toward afternoon a rumor became current that the road had been washed
+away ahead, and that the basha would have to stop some miles short of
+where we had hoped to be that night.  This was disheartening.
+For with all its shortcomings the basha was undeniably faster than
+perambulators.  The rumor gathered substance as we advanced, until in
+consequence we ceased to advance at all.  At a certain village,
+called Miyada, the basha drew up, and we were informed that it was
+impossible to proceed further.
+
+There was nothing for it but to hire kuruma.  The men were a rascally
+lot, and made gain of our necessity.  But we were not as sorry to
+leave the basha as we might have been, and the reports of
+impassability substantiated themselves before we had got a mile out.
+In further consolation, the kuruma men turned out well on the road,
+and bowled us along right merrily.  The road ran along the skirts of
+the mountains on the right, which fell in one long sweep to the
+river, a breadth of plain unexpectedly gored by streams.  The canons
+were startlingly abrupt, and the darkness which now came on took
+nothing from the effect.  A sudden zigzag down to a depth of a
+hundred feet, a careful hitching over a decrepit bridge, and a zigzag
+up the other side, and we were off at a good trot again.  This
+dispatch on the part of the men brought us in much-improved spirits
+and in very good time into Iijima, our hoped-for goal.
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+Down the Tenriugawa.
+
+We had made arrangements overnight for a boat, not without difficulty,
+and in the morning we started in kuruma for the point of embarkation.
+We were eager to be off upon our voyage, else we should have strolled
+afoot down the long meadow slope, such invitation lay in it, the dew
+sparkling on the grass blades, the freshly tilled earth scenting the
+air, and the larks rising like rockets up into the sky and bursting
+into song as they went.  It seemed the essence of spring, and we had
+a mile or more of it all before we reached the brink of the canon.
+For even here the river had begun a gorge for itself through the
+plain.  We left our jinrikisha at the top and zigzagged on foot down
+the steep descent, and straightway departed the upper life of fields
+and larks and sunshine for a new and semi-subterranean one.  It was
+not simply a change of scene; it was a complete change of sphere.
+The world with its face open to the day in a twinkling had ceased to
+be, and another world, a world of dark water girt by shadowed walls
+of rock and trees, had taken its place.
+
+Amid farewell wavings from the jinrikisha men we pushed off into the
+stream.  In spite of the rush of the water and the creaking of the
+oars, a strange stillness had fallen on everything.  The swirling,
+inky flood swept us on past the hushed banks, heights of motionless
+leaves nearly hiding the gray old rock.  Occasionally some puff of
+wind more adventurous than its fellows swooped down to make the
+leaves quiver a moment, and then died away in awe, while here and
+there a bird flew in and out among the branches with strangely
+subdued twitter.
+
+Although this part of the river could show its gorge and its rapids,
+it made only the preface to that chapter of its biography we had come
+to read.  At Tokimata, some hours further down, begins the voyage
+proper.  But even the preface was imposing.  The black water glided
+sinuous along, its stealthy course every now and again interrupted by
+rapids, where the sullen flood lashed itself to a passion of whitecaps
+with a kind of hissing roar.  Down these we shot, the boat bowing
+first in acquiescence, and then plunging as madly as the water
+itself.  It was hard to believe that both boat and river were not
+sentient things.
+
+At intervals we met other boats toiling slowly up stream, pulled
+laboriously by men who strained along the bank at the ends of
+hundreds of feet of tow-rope, the ropes themselves invisible at first
+for distance; so that we were aware only of men walking along the
+shore in attitudes of impossible equilibrium, and of boats that
+followed them doglike from pure affection.  It would seem weary work
+even for canal-boating.  It takes weeks to toil up what it once took
+only hours to float down.  As we sped past the return convoys,
+we seemed sad profligates, thus wantonly to be squandering such
+dearly-won vantage of position.  The stream which meant money to them
+was, like money, hard come and easy go.
+
+Still the stream hurried us on.  We hugged the cliffs, now on one
+side, now on the other, only to have them slip by us the quicker.
+Bend after bend opened, spread out, and closed.  The scene changed
+every minute, and yet was always the same.  Then at times we were
+vouchsafed openings in the surrounding hills, narrow bits of
+foreground, hints of a something that existed beyond.
+
+For three hours and more we kept on in our serpentine course, for the
+river meandered as whimsically as if it still had a choice of its own
+in the matter.  Then gradually the land about began to make overtures
+toward sociability.  The trees on the banks disappeared, the banks
+themselves decreased in height; then the river took to a more genial
+flow, and presently we were ware of the whole countryside to the
+right coming down in one long sweep to the water's edge.
+
+The preface was over.  The stream was to have a breathing spell of
+air and sunlight before its great plunge into sixty miles of twilight
+canon.  With a quick turn of his rudder oar the boatman in the stern
+brought the flat-bottomed craft round, and in a jiffy she lay beached
+on the shingle at Tokimata.  It was now high noon.
+
+The greater part of the village kindly superintended the operation of
+disembarking, and then the more active of its inhabitants trotted
+before as guides to the inn.  For our boat would go no further, and
+therefore all our belongings had to come out.  It was only when we
+inquired for further conveyance that the crowd showed signs of
+satiety and edged off.  To our importunities on this head the
+populace were statuesque or worse.  A Japanese assent is not always
+the most encouraging of replies, and a Japanese "No" touches in you a
+depth not unlike despair.  They have a way of hinting the utter
+hopelessness of your wish, past, present, and to come, an eternity of
+impossibility to make you regret that you ever were born.  After we
+had reached the inn, and had stated our wants to a more informed
+audience, we were told that the nautical part of the inhabitants were
+in the fields, gathering mulberry leaves for the silkworms.  From the
+bribe we offered to induce a change in pursuit, we judged money to be
+no object to them.  There remained nothing, therefore, but the police.
+
+It is good policy never to invoke the law except in the last
+extremity, for you are pretty safe to have some flaw shown up in
+you before you are through with it.  The law in this case was
+represented, Yejiro found, by a person still yellow with the
+jaundice.  He met the demand for boatmen with the counter demand for
+the passport, and when this was produced his official eye at once
+detected its anachronism.
+
+"This," said he, "is not in order.  I do not see how you can go on at
+all."
+
+To add artificial impossibility to natural, was too much.  Yejiro
+answered that he had better come to the inn; which he accordingly
+did.  Poor man!  I pitied him.  For, in the first place, he was still
+jaundiced; and, in the second, although conscious of guilt as I was,
+I was much the less disturbed of the two.  I was getting used to
+being a self-smuggler; while he, as the Japanese say, was "taihen
+komarimasu" (exceedingly "know not what to do"), a phrase which is a
+national complaint.  In this instance he had cause.  What to do with
+so hardened a sinner was a problem passing his powers.  Here was a
+law-breaker who by rights should at once be bundled back to Tokyo
+under police surveillance.  But he could not go himself, he had no
+one to send, and furthermore the delinquent seemed only too willing
+to escort himself there, free of government expense, as speedily as
+possible.  All I had to do was to whet his perception that the sooner
+boatmen were got the sooner I should be on the right side of the law
+again.  After some conflict with himself he went in search of men.
+
+I was left to study the carp-pond, with its gold and silver fish,
+the pivot of attention of the pretty little garden court which stood
+handy to the kitchen.  This juxtaposition was no accident; for such
+ponds are landscape and larder in one.  Between meals the fish are
+scenery; at the approach of the dinner hour they turn into game.
+The inn guest having sufficiently enjoyed the gambols of future repasts,
+picks out his dish to suit his taste or capacity, and the fish is
+instantly netted and translated to the gridiron.  The survivors, none
+the wiser, continue to steamboat about, intent on their own dinners,
+flashing their colors as they turn their armored sides in and out of
+the light.  Eccentric nature has fitted these prototypes of navigation
+with all the modern improvements.  Double and even triple sets of
+screws are common things in tails, and sometimes the fins, too, are
+duplex.  As for me, I had neither the heart nor the stomach to help
+depopulate the pond.  But I took much mechanical delight in their
+motions; so I fed them instead of they me.
+
+I had my choice between doing this and watching the late boatmen at
+their dinner in the distance.  No doubt moods have an aesthetic
+conscience of their own,--they demand appropriate setting; for I was
+annoyed at the hilarity of these men over their midday meal.  I bore
+them no malice, but I own I should have preferred not to have seen
+them thus making free with time they had declared themselves unable
+to sell to me.
+
+Thanks in part to my quality of outlaw, and in part to four hours'
+propitiation of the gods of delay, the jaundiced policeman finally
+succeeded in beating up a crew.  There were four conscripts in all,
+kerchiefed, not to say petticoated, in the native nautical costume;
+a costume not due to being fresh-water sailors, since their salt-water
+cousins are given to a like disguise of sex.  These mariners made us
+wait while they finished their preparations.  It meant a long voyage
+to them,--a facilis descensus Averni; sed revocare gradum,--a very
+long pull.  Then the bow was poled off, the current took us in its
+arms and swung us out into the stream, and the crowd on the shingle
+dropped perspectively astern.
+
+While I was still standing gazing at lessening Tokimata, I heard a
+cry from behind me, and, turning, ducked just in time to escape being
+unceremoniously somersaulted into the water by a hawser stretched
+from bank to bank at a level singularly suited to such a trick.
+The rope was the stationary half of a ferry to which I had neglected
+to make timely obeisance.  It marked, indeed, an incipient stage in
+the art of suspension bridges, the ferryboat itself supporting a part
+of the weight, while the ferryman pulled it and himself across.
+We met several more in the course of the next few minutes, before
+which we all bowed down into the bottom of the boat, while the hawser
+scraped, grumbling impotently, overhead.
+
+Our boat was of adaptive build.  It was forty-five feet long, not quite
+four feet wide, and somewhat over two feet deep.  These proportions
+and the character of the wood made it exceeding lithe, so that it
+bent like a willow before necessity.  In the stern stood the head
+man, wielding for rudder an oar half as long again as those the
+others used.  There was very little rowing done, nor was there need;
+the current itself took us along at racing speed.
+
+Shortly after ducking under the last ferry rope we reached the
+gateway to the canon.  Some rapids made an introduction, rocks in
+places jutting out of the foam, and while we were still curveting to
+the waves the hills suddenly closed in upon the stream in two
+beetling cliffs, spanned surprisingly by a lofty cantalever bridge.
+An individual who chanced to cross at the moment stopped in mid path
+to watch us through.  The stream swept us in, and the countryside
+contracted to a vanishing vista behind.  We were launched on our long
+canon voyage.  The change was as sudden as a thunderstorm of a
+smiling summer afternoon.  It was an eclipse of the earth by the
+earth itself.  Dark rocks picketed with trees rose in still darker
+shadow on either hand, higher than one could see.  The black river
+swirled beside us, silent, sullen, swift.  At the bottom of that
+gorge untrodden by man, borne by the dark flood that untouched by
+sunlight coiled snakelike along, we seemed adventured on some
+unforgotten Styx.
+
+For some time we had voyaged thus with a feeling not unlike awe, when
+all at once there was a bustle among the boatmen, and one of them
+went forward and stood up in the bow.  We swept round a corner, and
+saw our first great rapids three hundred yards ahead.  We could mark
+a dip in the stream, and then a tumbled mass of white water, while a
+roar as of rage came out of the body of it.  As we swept down upon
+the spot, the man in the bow began beating the gunwale with his oar
+in regularly repeated raps.  The board gave out a hollow ring that
+strangely filled the river chasm; a sound well calculated to terrify
+the evil spirits of the spot.  For indeed it was an exorcism of
+homoeopathic design.  His incantation finished, he stood motionless.
+So did the rest of us, waiting for the plunge.  The boat dipped by
+the bow, darted forward, and in a trice we were in the midst of a
+deafening turmoil of boiling waters and crashing breakers.  The
+breakers laid violent hands upon us, grappling at the frail gunwale
+and coming in part aboard, and then, as we slipped from their grasp,
+impotently flung their spray in our faces, and with a growl dropped
+astern.  The boat trembled like a leaf, and was trembling yet, when,
+with nightmare speed, the thing had slipped into the past, and we
+were shot out into the midst of the seething flood below.
+
+Not the least impressive part of the affair was the strange
+spirit-rapping on the bow.  The boatmen valiantly asserted that this
+was simply for signal to the man in the stern.  Undoubtedly now the
+action has largely cloaked itself in habit, but that it once was
+superstitious is unquestionable.  Devils still constitute far too
+respected a portion of the community in peasant parts of Japan.
+
+The steering the boatmen did was clever, but the steering the stream
+managed of its own motion was more so.  For between the rapids proper
+were swirls and whirlpools and races without end.  The current took
+us in hand at the turns, sweeping us down at speed straight for a
+rock on the opposite bank, and then, just as shipwreck seemed
+inevitable, whisked us round upon the other tack.  A thick cushion of
+water had fended the boat off, so that to strike would have been as
+impossible as it looked certain.  And then at intervals came the roar
+of another rapid, like a stirring refrain, with the boatman in the
+bow to beat the time.
+
+So we swept on, now through inky swirls of tide, now through
+snow-capped billows, moods these of the passing stream, while above
+the grand character of the gorge remained eternally the same.
+
+  The trees far up, sharp-etched against the blue,
+  Let but the river's strip of skylight through
+  To trees below, that on each jutting ledge
+  Scant foothold found to overlook the edge,--
+  As still as statues on their niches there,
+  Where no breeze stirred the ever-shadowed air,--
+  Spellbound spectators, crowded tier on tier
+  From where the lowest, bending to be near
+  The shock of spray, with leaves a-tremble stood
+  In shuddering gaze above the swirling flood.
+  The whole deep chasm, some vast natural nave
+  That to the thought a touch of grandeur gave,
+  And touch of grace,--for that wistaria clung
+  Upon the trees, its grapelike bunches hung
+  In stretch to catch their semblance in the stream;
+  Pale purple clusters, meant to live in dream,
+  Placed high above man's predatory clutch,
+  To sight alone vouchsafed, from harming touch
+  Wisely withheld as he is hurried past,
+  And thus the more a memory to last,
+  A violet vision; there to stay--fair fate--
+  Forever virginly inviolate.
+
+Slowly the strip of sky overhead became steeped in color, the half
+light at the bottom of the gorge deepened in tint, and suddenly a
+turn brought us out at a blaze in the cliff, where a handful of
+houses straggled up toward the outer world.  We had reached
+Mitsushima, a shafting in the tunnel, and our halting place for the
+night.
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+To the Sea.
+
+It was a ten minutes' walk, the next morning, from the inn down to
+the boat: an everwinding path along a succession of terraces studded
+with trees just breaking into leaf, and dotted with cottages, whose
+folk gave us good-day as we passed.  The site of the village sloped
+to the south, its cheek full turned to the sunshine that stole down
+and kissed it as it lay.  On this lovely May morning, amid the
+slumbering air, it made as amorous a bit of springtide as the heart
+could wish.  In front of us, in vignette, stretched the stream, half
+a mile of it to where it turned the corner.  Each succeeding level of
+terrace reset the picture, as if for trial of effect.
+
+The boat was waiting, lightly grounded on a bit of shingle left by a
+turn of the current.  Several enthusiastic followers accompanied us
+out to it with respectful insistence.
+
+On reaching our craft, we found, to our surprise, that it was full of
+bales of merchandise of large and plethoric habit.  We asked in
+astonishment what all this cargo meant.  The men answered sheepishly
+that it was to make the boat ride better.  The boat had ridden well
+enough the day before, and on general principles should, it would
+seem, ride all the better for being light.  But indeed their guilt
+was plain.  Our rascally boatmen, who had already charged a goodly
+sum for their craft, had thought to serve two masters, and after
+having leased the whole boat to me were intending now to turn a
+dishonest penny by shipping somebody else's goods into the bargain.
+In company with the rest of my kind, I much dislike to be imposed
+upon; so I told them they might instantly take the so-called ballast
+out again.  When I had seen the process of disembarkation fairly
+begun I relented, deciding, so long as the bales were already aboard,
+to take them on to the first stopping place, and there put them
+ashore.
+
+The river, its brief glimpse at civilization over, relapsed again
+into utter savagery.  Rocks and trees, as wild apparently as their
+first forerunners there, walled us in on the sides, and appeared to
+do so at the ends, making exit seem an impossibility, and entrance to
+have been a dream.  The stream gave short reaches, disclosing every
+few minutes, as it took us round a fresh turn, a new variation on the
+old theme.  Then, as we glided straight our few hundred feet, the
+wall behind us rose higher and higher, stretching out at us as if to
+prevent our possible escape.  We had thought it only a high cliff,
+and behold it was the whole mountain side that had stood barrier
+there.
+
+I cannot point the wildness of it all better than did a certain sight
+we came upon suddenly, round a corner.  Without the least warning,
+a bend in the current introduced us to a fishing-pole and a basket,
+reposing together on the top of a rock.  These two hints at humanity
+sat all by themselves, keeping one another company; no other sign of
+man was visible anywhere.  The pair of waifs gave one an odd feeling,
+as might the shadow of a person apart from the person himself.
+There was something uncanny in their commonplaceness in so uncommon
+a place.  While we were still wondering at the whereabouts of their
+owner, another turn disclosed him by a sort of cove where his boat
+lay drawn up.  Indeed, it was an ideal spot for an angler, and a
+lucrative one as well, for the river is naturally full of fish.
+Were I the angler I have seen others, I would encamp here for the
+rest of my life and feed off such phosphoric diet as I might catch,
+to the quickening of the brain and the composing of the body.
+But fortunately man has more of the river than of the rock in his
+composition, and whether he will or no is steadily being hurried past
+such nicks in life toward other adventures beyond.
+
+The rapids here were, if anything, finer than those above Mitsushima.
+Of them in all there are said to be more than thirty.  Some have
+nicknames, as "the Turret," "the Adze," "Boiling Rice," and "the
+Mountain Bath." Indeed, probably all of them have distinctive
+appellations, but one cannot ask the names of everybody in a
+procession.  There were some bad enough to give one a sensation.
+Two of the worst rocks have been blown up, but enough still remain to
+point a momentary moral or adorn an after tale.  All were exhilarating.
+Through even the least bad I should have been more than sorry to have
+come alone.  But confiding trust in the boatmen was not misplaced;
+for if questionable in their morals, they were above reproach in
+their water-craft.
+
+The rapids were incidents; the gorge we had always with us, superb
+cleft that it was, hewn as by some giant axe, notching the mountain
+chain imperiously for passage.  Hour followed hour with the same
+setting.  How the river first took it into its head to come through
+so manifestly unsuitable a place is a secret for the geologist to
+tell.  But I for one wish I had been by to see.
+
+From morning till noon we raced with the water at the bottom of the
+canon.  Each turn was like, and yet unlike, the one before, so that I
+wonder that I have other than a blurred composite picture on my
+mind's plate.  Yet certain bits have picked themselves out and ousted
+the rest, and the river comes up to me in thought as vivid as in
+life.
+
+These repeated disclosures that disclosed nothing lulled us at last
+into a happy unconsciousness of end in this subterranean passage to a
+lower world.  Though we were cleaving the mountain chain in part
+against the grain, indeed because we were, it showed no sign of
+giving out; until without premonition a curve shot us out at the foot
+of a village perched so perpendicularly on terraces that it almost
+overhung the stream.  It was called Nishinoto, and consisted of a
+street that sidled up between the dwellings in a more than alpine
+way.  Up it we climbed aerially to a teahouse for lunch; but not
+before I had directed the boatmen to discharge the smuggled goods.
+
+In another hour we were under way again less the uninvited bales,
+which, left sitting all alone on the sands, mutely reproached us till
+they could be seen no more.  At the first bend the gorge closed round
+about us as rugged as ever.  The rapids were not so dangerous as
+those above, but the stream was still fast if less furious.  When we
+looked at the water we did not appear to be moving at all, and when
+we looked up again at the bank we almost lost our balance for the
+sudden start.
+
+Then gradually a change crept over the face of things.  The stream
+grew a thought more steady, the canon a shade less wild.  We passed
+through some more rapids,--our last, the boatmen said.  The river
+began to widen, the mountains standing more respectfully apart.
+They let us see nothing new, but they showed us more of themselves,
+and grand buttresses they made.  Then the reaches grew longer, and other
+hills less high became visible ahead.  By all signs we were come to
+the beginning of the end.  Another turn, and we were confronted with
+a real view,--a very hilly view, to be sure, but one that belonged to
+the world of man.
+
+It was like coming out of a tunnel into the light.
+
+The current hurried us on.  At each bend the hills in front rose less
+wild than at the bend before.  Villages began to dot the shores,
+and the river spread out and took its ease.  Another curve, and we no
+longer saw hills and rocks ahead.  A great plain stretched before us,
+over which our eyes wandered at will.  Looking back, we marked the
+mountains already closing up in line.  I tried to place the river's gap,
+but the barrier had grown continuous to the eye.  Like adventurers in
+a fairy tale, the opening through which we had come had closed
+unrecognizably behind us.
+
+In front all was plain, every-day plain, with people tilling it,
+and hamlets; and in the immediate foreground, right athwart our course,
+a ferryboat full of folk.  As we bore down between it and the landing
+place two men gesticulated at us from the bank.  We swerved in toward
+them.  They shouted something to the boatmen, and Yejiro turned to
+me.  The wayfarers asked if we would let them go with us to the sea.
+There was no regular conveyance, and they much desired to reach the
+Tokaido that night.  What would I do?
+
+"Oh! Very well," said I, reluctantly, "take them on board."
+
+So it had come to this, after our romantic solitary voyage!  We were
+to end as a common carrier, after all.  One is born a demigod, the
+French say, to die a grocer.
+
+Our passengers were honest and businesslike.  Soon after coming
+aboard they offered to pay for their passage, an offer I politely
+declined.  Then they fell to chatting with Yejiro, and I doubt not in
+five minutes had possessed themselves of all our immediate history.
+
+Meanwhile, the river was lazily dropping us down to the sea.  On the
+left, at a respectful distance, a long, low rise, like a bit of
+fortification, ran down indefinitely in the same direction, by way of
+encouraging the stream.  Pitiable supposition!  Was this
+meadow-meandering bit of water indeed our wild Tenriugawa!  It seemed
+impossible.  Once we had a bathetic bit of excitement over a near
+case of grounding, where the water had spread itself out to ripple
+down to a lower level.  This was all to recall the past.  The stream
+had grown steady and profitable.  More than once we passed craft
+jarringly mercantile, and even some highly respectable automations,
+water-wheel boats anchored in the current, nose to tail, in a long
+line, apparently paddling up stream, but never advancing an inch.
+And all these sights had a work-a-day, machine look like middle age.
+
+The afternoon aged to match.  The sun began to dip behind the distant
+hills; and then toward the east, in front of us, came out the long
+outline of the Tokaido bridge, three quarters of a mile in length,
+like a huge caterpillar crawling methodically across the river-bed.
+Gradually we drew toward it, till its myriad legs glinted in the
+sunset glow; and then, as we swept under, it wheeled round to become
+instantly a gaunt stalking silhouette against the sky.  From below by
+the river's mouth the roar of the surf came forebodingly up out of
+the ashen east.  But in the west was still a glory, and as I turned
+to it I seemed to look down the long vista of the journey to western
+Noto by the sea.  I thought how I had pictured it to myself before
+starting, and then how little the facts had fitted the fancy.  It had
+lost and gained; if no longer maiden, it was mine, and the glamour
+that fringes the future had but changed to the glamour that gilds the
+past.  Distance had brought it all back again.  Delays, discomforts,
+difficulties, disappeared, and its memory rose as lovely as the sky
+past which I looked.  For the better part of place or person is the
+thought it leaves behind.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Noto, by Percival Lowell
+
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