Part 16

But it is late: we look again upon Kioto from the temple above, all swimming in light and haze, and walk back to our _kurumas_, a final good-by to the children, but we shall see their parents again; and then we return, and look from our veranda for the last time at the city stretched out in the evening, lost almost entirely in the twilight of a great lake of violet fog. A few shapes are just felt in the misty space, but no more than as waves in water, or as greater densities in the undulations of the colored vapor. So uncertain is everything that the nearest temple building loses its place, and floats all below its roof; but its wet tiles glitter, reflecting the rose-colored drift in the highest pale turquoise sky.

Below us, the trees make a delicate pattern of dark, wet lace.

Then the rose-color deepens and dulls, the upper sky becomes colorless; all floats in unreal space, and Kioto disappears from before my eyes: forever, I suppose--as the charm of this scene, which will never come again; as the little maiden whom I met to-day, only for an eternal good-by.

A JAPANESE DAY.--FROM KIOTO TO GIFU

NAGOYA, September.

Notwithstanding the long parting, which kept us up very late, the same courteous Japanese friends were at the hotel in the morning to bid us a still more final good-by. Oye-San alone remained faithful to his self-intrusted care of us, and determined to see us as far as the land would allow,--that is to say, to the shores of Biwa Lake.

The caravan was smaller now, diminished by our parting with Awoki, the interpreter, and the men necessary to trundle him about. Still we were a goodly company,--nineteen men in all, of whom two were masters, one the servant, and the rest the runners who were to get us and our baggage to Otzu on Biwa Lake long before noon. There was to be no novelty on our road, it being merely the highway from the capital to the lake. It was a lovely morning, the sun long risen, and all the places and buildings now a part of our memories glistening in the shadow and the dew. We turned our backs for the last time on Kiyomidzu, and ran through the great gate of the temple near us; then, bumping down the steep steps under it, skirted the great wall of Dai Butzu and the interminable side of the Sanjiu sangendo (the hall of the thirty-three spaces),[10] along which in old times the archers used to shoot. Then we gradually got out of the city, into the road filled with traffic going both ways. There seemed to be no break between town and country. Here and there the mountain side, covered with trees, descended to the road. But the effect was that of a long street, deep among hills, and continuously spotted with buildings. Long trains of beautiful black bulls, drawing lumber or merchandise, or carrying straw-covered bales, streamed peacefully along. We passed peasant women,--hardy, tall, sometimes handsome, with scarlet undergowns held up; occasionally one riding on a pack-horse, or in her place a child perched on the hump of the wooden saddle. Or, again, peasants bearing loads on their backs, or carriers with weighty merchandise swung between them on poles; priests, young and old, stepping gravely in their white, or yellow, or black dresses--some with umbrellas open, others, whose quicker step meant that they had not far to go (perhaps only to some wayside temple), protecting their shaven heads with outspread fan. Or a kuruma, usually with one runner, taking into town, economically, two women together, one old, one young, and followed by another kuruma carrying some old gentleman, very thin or very fat, the head of a family. Kurumas carrying Japanese tourists or travelers, with hideous billycock hats, or Anglo-Indian helmets, or wide straw hats _à la mode de_ Third Avenue, these abominable head-pieces contrasting with their graceful gowns, as did their luggage, wrapped up in silk handkerchiefs with their European traveling rugs. Or, again, other kurumas carrying unprotected females in pairs, with the usual indifferent or forlorn look; or couples of young girls more gaily dressed, with flowery hairpins, the one evidently a chaperon to the other; then a Government official, _all_ European, with hurrying runners; sometimes, but rarely, the Japanese litter, or _kago_, or several if for a party, their occupants lying at their ease as to their backs, but twisted into knots as to their feet, and swaying with the movement of the trotting carriers. Bent to one side by the heavy ridgepole, which passes too low to allow the head to lie in the axis of the body, sweet-eyed women's faces, tea-rose or peach-colored, looked up from the bamboo basket of the litter. With proper indifference their lords and masters looked at us obliquely. On the roofs was spread a miscellaneous quantity of luggage.

From time to time troopers or officers, of course in European costume, mounted on Japanese chargers, cantered past. Two hours of this; then the sides of the road, which had risen and fallen with hill and valley, melted away, and the harbor of Otzu and Lake Biwa and blue mountains over the water, and others sketched in the air, were spread before us in the blaze of sunlight seen through the cool shadow of the mountains.

We rode down the hill to a little jetty, marvelously like a North River dock, with big sheds where passengers were waiting, and a little steamer fastened to the wharf. We bade good-by for the last time to Oye-San, who said many things that we appreciated but did not understand the words of, and who pointed to the square Japanese sails glittering in the far-off light, saying, "Fune, Fune!" ("The boats, the boats!") We dismissed kurumas and kurumaya and sailed off with Hakodate (the courier) alone. We stretched ourselves on the upper deck, half in sun, half in shadow, and blinked lazily at the distant blue mountains and the great sea-like lake.

Two hours later we had landed at a long jetty, in a heavy sea, with tossing dark blue water, different from the quiet azure of our sail. The brisk wind, blowing the white clouds over the blue sky, was clear and cold. We got out of its reach, as I felt neuralgic, and tried to sleep in a little tea-house, waking to the screams of the tea-house girl, "Mairimasho!" and I had but time to get into the train. Whether it started from there or had arrived there, I never knew. I had been glad to forget everything in dreamland.

I remember little of my railroad ride, what with neuralgia and heat, and the effects of the dance of the little steamer on Lake Biwa. There were mountains and ravines, and vast engineering protections for our path, and everywhere the evidence of a struggle with the many running waters we crossed or skirted. The blue and silver of the lake that we had crossed, and the sweetness of its air, were shut out in the dust and the heat of mountain sides. We had not seen the Eight Beauties of Biwa Lake.[11] The "Autumn Moon from Ishiyama" had set long before we passed, and the idea of other temples to be seen brought out A----'s antagonism to more climbing, only to be rewarded by promenades through lanterns and shrines and confused struggling with dates and divinities. "The Evening Snow on Hira-yama" was not to fall until we should be across the Pacific; nor could we ask of that blue September morning "The Blaze of Evening at Seta" nor "The Evening Bell of Mii-dera"--though we heard the bell early, and wondered whether it were still uninjured, from the time when big Benkei carried it off and exchanged it for too much soup, exactly seven hundred years ago; nor "Rain by Night at Karasaki," the place of the famous pine-tree, which was growing, they say, twenty-four hundred years ago, when Jimmu was emperor. There I might have met, perhaps, the "Old Man and the Old Woman" you have seen over and over again in the pictures and on the fans. (They are the spirits of the other old pine-trees of Takasago and Sumiyoshi, and they are fond of visiting each other.) Nor did we see "The Wild Geese alighting at Katada," but I felt as if I had seen "The Boats sailing back from Yabase" and "The Bright Sky with a Breeze at Awadzu." If I had not, I still had seen boats sailing over and under as lovely a blue as can be spread by early September days. I suppose that our friend Oye-San was trying to recall these last classical quotations to me when he bade me good-by at the landing in Otzu. An ocean rolls between his Parnassus and ours, but he lives much nearer to the mood that once made beautiful the names of Tempe and Helicon and the winding Meander.

With all this dreaming I fell asleep, and woke free from pain, but stupid and unimpressionable, as our train stopped at the little station from which we were to ride to Gifu. This was a little, new way-station (of course I don't remember its name), so like, and so unlike, one of ours, with the same look of the railroad being laid down--"imposed"--on an earth which did not understand what it all meant--grass struggling to get back to the sides of filled-up ditches; timbers lying about; new, astonished buildings, in one of which we washed, and waited, and dined. Meanwhile Hakodate went after the runners who were to drag us on our afternoon ride, and then, if "we suited," to run with us the whole week, thirty-five miles a day, along the Tokaido, back toward Yokohama.

When all was ready it was late afternoon, and our procession ran along what seemed to be a vast plain of tableland, with high mountains for an edge. All seemed as clear and neat as the air we rode in. Somewhere there we must have passed the hill of "The Turning Back of the Chariot": this means that, long ago,--that is to say, about 1470,--the regent Yoshimoto, while traveling here, found that the inhabitants, to do him honor, had put in order, neat and trim, the thatch of every building. What the prince was looking for is what we call the picturesque. To miss all the charms that ruin brings was too much for his esthetic soul, and he ordered the wheels of his chariot to be turned for home. So did not we. Neater and neater grew the inclosures, farms, and villages; the fences had pretty gates,--curious patterns of bamboo pickets,--a far-away, out-of-the-world flavor of Holland or Flanders. Even the ordinary setting out of wayside trees, in this province of forestry, insisted on the analogy, confused perhaps with a dream of Lombard plains and mountains in a cool blue distance, for the mind insists on clinging to reminiscences, as if afraid to trust itself to the full sea of new impressions.

As I rode along, so neat and clean was each picture, framed in sunlight if we were in shadow, or in clear shade when we were in sunlight, that I thought I could remember enough small facts for sketches and notes when I should get to Gifu. We reached Gifu in the early twilight, and had no special one impression; we were framed in by the streets, and confused by turning corners, and disturbed by anxiety to get in. But we had one great triumph. Our guide was new to the place--as we were; and we chose our inn at our own sweet will, with a feeling of authority and personal responsibility delicious to experience after such ignominy of guidance. Up we went to our rooms, and opening the _shojis_[12] looked out upon the river, which seemed broad as a great lake. Our house was right upon it, and the open casement framed nothing but water and pointed mountains, stealing away in the obscure clearness of a colorless twilight. The running of the river, sloping down from the hills on a bed of pebbles, cut off the noises of the town, if there were any, and the silence was like that of far-away country heights. In this semi-painful tension the day's pictures disappeared from my mind. I was all prepared to have something happen, for which I should have been listening, when suddenly our host appeared, to say that the boats were coming down the river. The chilly evening air gave us new freshness, and off we started, deaf to the remonstrances of Hakodate, who had prepared and set out his very best for supper. We rushed past the artist in cookery, whose feelings I could yet appreciate, and plunged after our host into the dark streets. In a few minutes we were by the riverside, and could see far off what we took for our boat, with its roof and lanterns. The proffered backs of our lantern-bearing attendants gave the solution of how we were to get to it. Straddling our human nags, we were carried far out into the shallow, pebbly river, landed into the boat, and poled out into deeper water, nothing to be seen but the night and the conical hills, one of which I fancied to be Inaba, where was once Nobunaga's castle. Some faint mists were white in the distance, as if lighted by a rising moon. At no great distance from us, perhaps at a quarter of a mile, a light flickered over the water. On our approach we could distinguish a man connected with it, who apparently walked on the dark surface. He was evidently a fisherman or a shrimper, and his movements had all the strangeness of some long-legged aquatic bird. He knew his path, and, far out, followed some track or ford, adding to the loneliness as does a crane in a marshy landscape. Then I saw him no more, for he headed up the river toward an opening between the hills. Suddenly a haze of light rounded the corner of the nearest mountain, then grew into a line of fire coming toward us. Above the rustle of the river's course, and our own against it, came the beating of a cry in unison. The line of flame broke into many fires, and we could see the boats rushing down upon us. As quickly as I can write it, they came in an even line, wide apart--perhaps fifty feet or so--enough for us to pass between, whereupon we reversed our movement and drifted along with them. In the front of each boat, hung upon a bent pole, blazed a large cresset filled with pine knots, making above a cloud of smoke, starred with sparks and long needles of red cinders. Below, in the circle of each light, and on its outer rim, swam many birds, glossy black and white cormorants, straining so at the cords that held them that they appeared to be dragging the boats. As they spread like a fan before the dark shadow of the bows, the cords which fastened them glistened or were black in the night. Each string ran through the fingers of the master-fisher at the bows, and was fastened to his waist and lost in the glittering straw of his rain-skirt. Like a four-in-hand driver, he seemed to feel his birds' movements. His fingers loosened or tightened, or, as suddenly, with a clutch pulled back. Then came a rebellious fluttering, and the white glitter of fish in the beaks disappeared--unavailingly; each bird was forcibly drawn up to the gunwale, and seized by the neck encircled by its string-bearing collar. Then a squeeze--a white fish glittered out again and was thrown back into the boat. The bird scuttled away, dropped back into the water, and, shaking itself, was at work again. They swam with necks erect, their eyes apparently looking over everything, and so indifferent to small matters as to allow the big cinders to lie unnoticed on their oily, flat heads. But, every few seconds, one would stoop down, then throw back its head wildly with a fish crosswise in its mouth. When that fish was a small one it was allowed by the master of the bird to remain in the capacious gullet. Each pack guided by a master varied in numbers, but I counted thirteen fastened to the waist of the fisherman nearest to us. Behind him stood another poling: then farther back an apprentice, with a single bird, was learning to manage his feathered tools. In the stern stood the steersman, using a long pole. Every man shouted, as huntsmen encouraging a pack, "Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!"--making the cry whose rhythm we had heard when the flotilla bore down upon us.

Ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, more passed as we kept alongside with motionless celerity. I tried to sketch in the insufficient light--making sometimes one sketch right upon another, so little could I see my lines in the treacherous light. Then the boats swerved off and were driven to the shore together, or as far as we could get to it, in the shallow water. Above us rose the steep green hillside, the trees and rocks lit up in an arabesque of light and dark by the now diminished flames.

The birds rested, standing in the water, preening their oily backs and white bellies, and flapping their ragged wings, which seemed to have been clipped. The apprentice caressed his bird, the fishermen and the steerers laughed and exchanged jokes and chatted generally, with all the good nature and making light of hard work which is so essentially Japanese.

Then the birds began to fight, and to show that peace was not their pleasure. Fresh pine knots were thrown into the cressets; each man took his place; the polers pushed off; the birds strained at the strings; and all _da capo_. A little longer we watched, and then we let the boats glide past us; the fires faded again into a haze of light as they went down the river toward the bridges of the town, now dotted with people.

Then we were carried to the shore as we had left it, and were piloted home through the streets, now filled with lanterns and movement. We found our outraged artist in cookery still indignant over our neglect of food, but he was gradually appeased, and made up for his hungry masters a fairly sufficient meal. Cigars, a scrutiny of my despairing sketches, and a long look at the lovely melancholy of the river and mountains before we closed the _shojis_ for the night.

[10] Three hundred and eighty-nine feet long.

[11] Omi-no-hakkei.

[12] Sliding screens, which take the place of our windows.

FROM KAMBARA TO MIYANOSHITA--A LETTER FROM A KAGO

September 28.

I am writing in a _kago_.[13] You do not know what an achievement this is, but I shall explain later on what a kago is, why I am in it, and why it is not exactly the place to expect a letter from. To begin at the beginning, we were yesterday afternoon at Kambara, on the gulf of Suruga Bay. We had eaten there in an inn by the water, while I watched through the screens the waving of a palm tree in the wind, which was now blowing autumnally and had cleared the sky and enlivened us with a hope of continuous view of Fuji. Along the beach, as we rode away, the breakers ran far up the sand, and the water was green as emerald from the brown, wet shore to the distant blue haze of the ocean in the south. At the end of the great curve of the gulf stretched the lines of green and purple mountains, which run far off into Idzu, and above them stood Fuji in the sky, very pale and clear, with one enormous band of cloud half-way up its long slope, and melting into infinite distance toward the ocean. Its nearest point hung half across the mountain's base, more solid than the mountain itself, and cast a long shadow upon it for miles of distance. Above, the eye could but just detect a faint haze in the delicate blue of the sky. Best of all weather, we thought; a breeder of bad weather, according to our men, who, alas! knew more of it than we did. For a mile now, perhaps, we ran along between the sea and the abrupt green wall of hills, so steep that we could not see them, and, turning sharply around a corner, beheld Fuji, now filling the entire field of sight, seeming to rise even from below us into the upper sky, and framed at its base by near green mountains; these opened as a gate, and showed the glittering streak of the swollen Fujikawa, the swiftest river in Japan.

The lower eastern slope was cut off by clouds, but its western line, ineffably delicate in clearness, stretched to the left out of our range of vision. Below its violet edge the golden slope spread in the sun, of the color of an autumn leaf. Along the center of this province of space the shadow of the great cloud rested. The marks of the spurs of the mountain were as faint as the streaks of the wind on a grain-field. Its cone was of a deep violet color, and as free of snow as though this had been the day of poetic tradition upon which the snow entirely disappears to fall again the following night. No words can recall adequately the simple splendor of the divine mountain. As A---- remarked, it was worth coming to far Japan for this single day.

Right into this marvelous picture we rode, through green plantations and rice-fields, which edged the bases of the nearest hills and lay between us and the river. There we found no means of crossing. All bridges had been carried away by the flood. The plain was inundated; travelers had been detained for a week by a sea of waters, and were scattered there and in neighboring villages, filling every resting-place; and, worst of all, the police officials would not allow us to tempt the fishermen to make the dangerous crossing.

The occasion was a solemn one. The police representative, upon seeing us come in person to request help, slipped off the easy Japanese dress which he was wearing in these days of forced idleness, and reappeared from behind the screen clad in his official European costume. I have no doubt that our interpreter explained to him what important persons we were, and what important letters we bore to important people of the land, for he kindly suggested that we might sail past the mouth of the river, from near Kambara, whence we had just come, so as to land far away from the spread of all this devastation; and he offered to send a deputy with a requisition for a junk and sufficient sailors from the nearest fishing-village on the bay--and so we returned. While Hakodate and the messenger went on to make all arrangements, A---- and myself stopped at the place where we had had our view of Fuji, to make a more careful sketch. You can have no idea of how much closer the clearer mind worked out the true outline of the mountain, which my excitement had heightened at least a couple of thousand feet; nor should I forget how my two-legged horse of a runner held my paint-box for me, and seemed to know exactly when and where I wished to dip my brush. It seemed to me that only a few moments had passed when the messenger returned to say that the boat was ready to launch, and that we must hurry to be out at sea before sunset; this too in view of the storm, which we might escape if we hurried. The implied threat made no impression on me. The picture before us had not changed any more than if painted by man. The great cloud hung fixed, apparently, in the same place. All was still: perhaps in the uppermost sky one could distinguish some outlines of white in the blue. Still we hurried off and arrived upon a scene of confusion and wild excitement. A captain and a crew had been found; their boat stood high up on the crest of the surf, now beating on the shore, and carried the line with which to pull out the small junk, still far up on the beach. The wheels of our kurumas had been taken off and their bodies had been placed in the hold.

As we got on board at least a hundred naked men pushed and tugged to start the junk upon the slope of sand. The sun was setting suddenly behind the headland of Shizuoka, and the air was filled with the moisture from the sea; a rosy bloom, pink as the clouds themselves, filled the entire air, near and far, toward the light. On the other side the distance was fading into gray and violet mist. The great mountain was still a great clear mass, but colorless, like the northern sky behind it, while, bathed in the color of fairyland, we rose and fell over the breakers--the spray, the waves, the boat, the bodies of the men, glistening and suffused with pink.