KITZUKI, August 10, 1891.
MY Japanese friends urge me to visit Hinomisaki, where no European has
ever been, and where there is a far-famed double temple dedicated to
Amaterasu-oho-mi-Kami, the Lady of Light, and to her divine brother
Take-haya-susa-no-wo-no-mikoto. Hinomisaki is a little village on
the Izumo coast about five miles from Kitzuki. It maybe reached by a
mountain path, but the way is extremely steep, rough, and fatiguing. By
boat, when the weather is fair, the trip is very agreeable. So, with a
friend, I start for Hinomisaki in a very cozy ryosen, skilfully sculled
by two young fishermen.
Leaving the pretty bay of Inasa, we follow the coast to the right--a
very lofty and grim coast without a beach. Below us the clear water
gradually darkens to inky blackness, as the depth increases; but at
intervals pale jagged rocks rise up from this nether darkness to catch
the light fifty feet under the surface. We keep tolerably close to
the cliffs, which vary in height from three hundred to six hundred
feet--their bases rising from the water all dull iron-grey, their sides
and summits green with young pines and dark grasses that toughen
in sea-wind. All the coast is abrupt, ravined, irregular--curiously
breached and fissured. Vast masses of it have toppled into the sea; and
the black ruins project from the deep in a hundred shapes of menace.
Sometimes our boat glides between a double line of these; or takes a
zigzag course through labyrinths of reef-channels. So swiftly and deftly
is the little craft impelled to right and left, that one could almost
believe it sees its own way and moves by its own intelligence. And again
we pass by extraordinary islets of prismatic rock whose sides, just
below the water-line, are heavily mossed with seaweed. The
polygonal masses composing these shapes are called by the
fishermen 'tortoise-shell stones.' There is a legend that once
Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami, to try his strength, came here, and, lifting up
one of these masses of basalt, flung it across the sea to the mountain
of Sanbeyama. At the foot of Sanbe the mighty rock thus thrown by the
Great Deity of Kitzuki may still be seen, it is alleged, even unto this
day.
More and more bare and rugged and ghastly the coast becomes as we
journey on, and the sunken ledges more numerous, and the protruding
rocks more dangerous, splinters of strata piercing the sea-surface from
a depth of thirty fathoms. Then suddenly our boat makes a dash for the
black cliff, and shoots into a tremendous cleft of it--an earthquake
fissure with sides lofty and perpendicular as the walls of a canyon-and
lo! there is daylight ahead. This is a miniature strait, a short cut to
the bay. We glide through it in ten minutes, reach open water again, and
Hinomisaki is before us--a semicircle of houses clustering about a bay
curve, with an opening in their centre, prefaced by a torii.
Of all bays I have ever seen, this is the most extraordinary. Imagine an
enormous sea-cliff torn out and broken down level with the sea, so as
to leave a great scoop-shaped hollow in the land, with one original
fragment of the ancient cliff still standing in the middle of the gap--a
monstrous square tower of rock, bearing trees upon its summit. And a
thousand yards out from the shore rises another colossal rock, fully
one hundred feet high. This is known by the name of Fumishima or
Okyogashima; and the temple of the Sun-goddess, which we are now about
to see, formerly stood upon that islet. The same appalling forces which
formed the bay of Hinomisaki doubtless also detached the gigantic mass
of Fumishima from this iron coast.
We land at the right end of the bay. Here also there is no beach; the
water is black-deep close to the shore, which slopes up rapidly. As we
mount the slope, an extraordinary spectacle is before us. Upon thousands
and thousands of bamboo frames--shaped somewhat like our
clothes-horses--are dangling countless pale yellowish things, the
nature of which I cannot discern at first glance. But a closer
inspection reveals the mystery. Millions of cuttlefish drying in the
sun! I could never have believed that so many cuttlefish existed in
these waters. And there is scarcely any variation in the dimensions of
them: out of ten thousand there is not the difference of half an inch in
length.