I leave Matsue for Kitzuki early in the afternoon of a beautiful
September day; taking passage upon a tiny steamer in which everything,
from engines to awnings, is Lilliputian. In the cabin one must kneel.
Under the awnings one cannot possibly stand upright. But the miniature
craft is neat and pretty as a toy model, and moves with surprising
swiftness and steadiness. A handsome naked boy is busy serving the
passengers with cups of tea and with cakes, and setting little charcoal
furnaces before those who desire to smoke: for all of which a payment of
about three-quarters of a cent is expected.
I escape from the awnings to climb upon the cabin roof for a view; and
the view is indescribably lovely. Over the lucent level of the lake we
are steaming toward a far-away heaping of beautiful shapes, coloured
with that strangely delicate blue which tints all distances in the
Japanese atmosphere--shapes of peaks and headlands looming up from the
lake verge against a porcelain-white horizon. They show no details,
whatever. Silhouettes only they are--masses of absolutely pure colour.
To left and right, framing in the Shinjiko, are superb green surgings
of wooded hills. Great Yakuno-San is the loftiest mountain before us,
north-west. South-east, behind us, the city has vanished; but proudly
towering beyond looms Daisen--enormous, ghostly blue and ghostly white,
lifting the cusps of its dead crater into the region of eternal snow.
Over all arches a sky of colour faint as a dream.
There seems to be a sense of divine magic in the very atmosphere,
through all the luminous day, brooding over the vapoury land, over the
ghostly blue of the flood--a sense of Shinto. With my fancy full of the
legends of the Kojiki, the rhythmic chant of the engines comes to my
ears as the rhythm of a Shinto ritual mingled with the names of gods:
Koto-shiro-nushi-no-Kami, Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami.