heavy stones came up again. This time it did not die away, it stopped
abruptly, as though by force of will. And we waited.
It was so cold that I could sit still no longer, and, wrapping my cloak
around me, tired as I was, walked up and down, up and down.
The overhanging rocks, whose outlines showed so ghostly against the
livid darkness, rose high above our heads. From time to time the
sulphur thickened in the air, making us cough.
And the deathness of that silence, the dumb horror of that stillness
spread and spread and spread. It was all afraid.
* * * * *
The boy, curled under his rock, slept peacefully. We walked and waited.
Then, in an instant, two great tongues of flame shot into the darkness,
leapt high toward the sky, and two reports, as of the heaviest thunder,
shook the mountain. The boy, awakened, jumped up quickly, looked at
the flames as they sprang into the darkness, and the thunder of the
second report shook the ground beneath his feet, turned to speak, when
a sudden sharp clatter came like a hiss past all our ears, calling
“Stones, stones,” he threw himself flat on his face and rolled right
under the rock.
We, too, rushed to the overhanging rocks and crouched down quickly, and
the sharp clatter of stone on stone went on all around us.
Asama had rumbled to some purpose, and she was resting.
Then the utter silence, the dead, dumb horror came back, came back
again. Fear breathed beside us in the darkness.
Slowly the little stars above the rocks dropped out of the sky, the
livid darkness changed to livid light, and it was dawn, a cold, grey
dawn, but little lighter than the night had been. Still we could see,
see the lava and the ash, so, rolling out from under our rock, we shook
ourselves together, chattering with cold.
The ground at our feet was sprinkled with pinky-grey stones, daubed
with bright yellow sulphur, and glowing hot. They were as large as
a clenched fist, with edges sharp and jagged. We stooped to pick up
one--the least hot--and carry it wrapt in handkerchiefs, which it
burnt, and mackintoshes which it singed, back to Karuizawa.
The boy looked at the stones, looked at us, looked towards the crater,
and asked with many warnings if we were to go on. We, too, looked at
the stones, and thoughtfully towards the crater, and, as we looked, the
mountain rumbled slowly in its depths.
Seizing the basket, the boy fled, our one and only guide. We followed
him, over the cracks and the spongy soft lava, too occupied with
wondering how we had ever passed over it safely the night before to be
afraid now--too busy, too, watching the boy fleeing in front of us,
too occupied marking his path to think even of eruptions. And somehow
we got over safely, back on to the solid cinder slope of Asama again,
the slope that went down straight as a shoot, and fell away as abruptly
on each side as a bridge. It was ground, and after the cracks and the
sucking lava, solid, though the cinders did shift beneath our feet.
We had leisure to look round us, and found the mountain wrapped in a
thick white mist. By this time the boy had disappeared entirely, but we
did not trouble now. There seemed no choice of paths down. Our cinder
bridge went on, sloping steeply downwards into the hidden world below,
and we followed it.
* * * * *
A little way below, the mist sank suddenly beneath our feet, and we
were walking in the yellow sunlight--walking down a cinder slope that
shone jet-black against a pale blue sky, while all around and all
beneath, and surging up against the cinder slope, floated a wild wide
sea of dead white clouds--a dead, still sea, with its waves stiffened
into frozen snow. Tossing, it lay beneath the clear blue sky, and
the pale sun glinted on its snow-white crests, glinted on the still
gigantic billows that stretched from cinder pathway to the far blue
sky. It lay a silent sea of milk-white frozen waves that was such stuff
as dreams are made of.
* * * * *
And we went on, down. As the gods of old along a sloping bridge that
crossed the clouds and stretched from the blue heaven to the hidden
earth beneath, like Izanagi and Izanami, as they crossed the rainbow
bridge from the High Plain of Heaven and stirred the floating brine
with their jewelled spear--stirred till it went “_koro, koro_”--till it
went “curdle, curdle,” as the old chronicle says, and the drops that
dripping fell from the celestial spear piled up into the firstborn of
the islands of Japan.
A sudden peal of echoing thunder shook our cinder bridge, and we turned
abruptly. Somewhere on the other side of the topmost edge of cinder
rose up a huge column of thick smoke. The wickedest dead-white smoke,
which, slowly curling over at the tips like ostrich feathers, showed
shadows of deep mauve and dull blue-purple, while from below the heavy
pouring of great stones drove up and up. Asama rumbled, rumbled in her
depths. Half an hour sooner we should have been up there still. Had we
gone on to the crater we should have been on the very edge. The memory
of the sharp-edged clattering stones, red-hot and big as fists, came
back to us. We looked at one another silently, and went on, downwards.
Slowly the gigantic plumes of thick curdled smoke drifted up into the
blue, and they were very beautiful. It was as though Asama wore a
sweeping white _panache_ in her coal-black helmet. But the thundering
roar of the eruption had torn our sea of frozen snow, to pieces. The
blank white mist shut swiftly down, and hid the mountain and the smoke,
the cinders and the sky; only the wide black bridge was left sloping
straight downwards.
* * * * *
We reached our horses drenched, to sit on high-peaked saddles and
journey back through dank dripping trees, over rutty roads, across
thick green commons heavy with mist, back cold, wet and hungry to
Karuizawa again.
But we kept our stone, and though we had not seen into the crater,
we had perhaps come nearer to that mysterious force, itself unseen,
unknown, which dwells beneath the lava and the ash, and terrorises
life.
VI
CAMELLIAS
Blue bay below as far as eye can reach. Blue sky above, blue to the
edge of the horizon. And in between a steep cliff of green: dark fir,
pale bamboo, and that impenetrable undergrowth for which alone a
botanist has a name--or names.
The time of the plum blossom has been, is gone, and the world is
drowsing in the dream of summer. Up here in the green the quick sappy
life is stirring, I can hear it plainly; for in all the world there is
no other sound.
The trodden green path runs up, from blue to blue. Midway between the
two I stop. And the green world closes in around me, shutting out the
blue I came from and the blue to which I go.
The tall dark firs sway slowly. The pale bamboos wave slim fingers,
green as March lime leaves in the sun, their golden stems are elusive
and bewitching, sunned dryads of the East.
The green world has me in its hold. I forget the steep path to the blue
above. It is warm and still, and the bamboos beckon as they sway.
How green it is! All the greens a painter ever dreamt of ... and the
graceful bamboos beckon Eastern Vivians to bewitch.
I stay to look and look--never trees so graceful nor the green world
so fair. A step. I have left the pathway,--and then--I stop. Beyond the
pale bamboos and above them, its dark green branches rising upwards to
the blue, is a camellia tree. Each glossy handful of leaves holds a
single blood-red flower. And the tree stands there beyond, above the
swaying, beckoning bamboos, stern, severe.
“And the Wages of Sin is Death.”
* * * * *
I turn back to the path. The blue below spreads out as far as eye can
reach, the blue above lies shining at the end of the pathway. The green
world between is still.
But the path is very steep.
VII
RAIN
The world is wet as when first parted from the waters; and the
firmament above, uncertain in its new position, seems slipping bodily
down to join the waters below. The sound of falling rain, unformed,
continuous, seems to have come from the time before Time was; while
the tiny squelch of liquid mud oozing up between the bare toes of the
_kurumaya_ alone marks the present.
It is dark. The paper lantern, swinging at the end of the shaft, lights
up the pools of the roadway with a transient gleam. For the rest, alone
in my miniature hansom, with the apron up to my eyes, and the roof down
to my eyebrows, the world, with the rushing swish of falling rain,
seems dissolving slowly into the waters, and the history of creation
marching backwards.
A splash of wheels behind me, and the black mushroom hat of my
_kurumaya_ bobs up above the apron, for the hill is steep. A shout, and
the _’ricksha_ behind me stops. My _kurumaya_ stands still, holding
the thin lacquered shafts in his hands and shouts back. Then he drags
me to the roadside, and, putting the shafts on the ground, steps over
them and disappears with his lantern. Balancing in my _kuruma_ like the
monks on the miserere seats I am left all alone.
What is the matter?
A splash of wheels, the heavy panting of two men. They are pulling
the other _kuruma_ up the steep hill, and will come back for me. So I
wait, rigid; for the hill is steep, the mud slippery and the angle of
the seat precarious. I strain my eyes to see--a corner of muddy road,
half the blurred outline of a hedge. And not all the light in all the
world could show me more, for the roof above my head is as a hand on my
eyelids pressing them downwards.
The wheels have splashed their way up the hill, and I can hear them no
longer. Only the sound of the falling rain, driven momentarily away by
the sharper splash of the moving wheels, comes back, slowly, steadily,
irresistibly, submerging the world and me.
I am all alone, a stranger in a strange land, behind me an unknown
road, in front--I strain my eyes to see. Even the hedge has grown
unfamiliar. It is no hedge, nothing but impenetrable undergrowth. I am
on the edge of a forest.
And the road?
For the first time I notice how strange even the mud of a road can be.
This is trodden all over with the prints of naked human feet, and the
endless knife cuts of the _gheta_.
The loneliness is wrapping itself around me as a pall.
The dull swish of the rushing raindrops goes on and on. How long have
they left me in a dissolving world alone. No sound above, no sound
below. And the rush of the falling rain is drumming in my ears.
A hideous nightmare possesses me. Surely the trickling pools are
carrying away the mud from under my wheels. I shall slip down, down
into nothingness with the falling rain.
I dare not move. My eyes are fixed on the narrow strip of muddy road in
front of me. The shafts are surely slipping----
Then the rush of the falling raindrops drowns the world.
VIII
THE BLACK CANAL
The handle of the Japanese guitar, from which Lake Biwa takes its name,
is at Otsu, six miles from Kyoto and three hundred feet above it.
Between stands all the thickness of Kyoto’s girdle of mountains. Built
in the flat bottom of an immense bowl, dark green with pine-clad hills,
Kyoto, the ancient capital, is still the artistic centre of Japan. It
is a city of 350,000 inhabitants, and many manufactories, but with
little water or water transit, while only six miles away, beyond the
mountains and above the town, Lake Biwa stretches a long arm from the
ports of the west coast towards the city.
It was in 1890 that Tanabe Sakuro, piercing the heart of the mountains,
brought the waters of Lake Biwa, running swiftly under the hills, into
Kyoto. And the Black Canal begins at Otsu.
Deep down in the last of the rampart of locks which shuts out the lake
lies the long narrow _sampan_, a white gondola, carpeted and cushioned,
a large torch flames on either side, and the boatman stands ready
behind. We sit on the cushions on the carpet, for the canal is but
just the height of a man, and but just the width of two _sampan_. The
cement sides of the lock rise up like walls; in front is the black arch
of a tunnel, cut like a tiny doorway in the base of the great green
mountain. A moment, and we are inside, in the pitch blackness; rushing
swiftly, silently along in the freshness of a subterranean night. The
two huge torches that we carry show the darkness falling like a thick
curtain before, behind us; and the silence is the silence of infinite
ages asleep.
The rhythm of the rushing water passes like a breath through the
darkness, but the speed is unfelt. Move your hand beyond the side of
the boat, and the contact of the wall will tear all the skin from the
knuckles in one swift scrape. For the water rushes, rushes silent in
the darkness, not a current but a force.
Suddenly in the blackness there is a light; three nude figures poised,
their muscles strained, human strength pitted against the water’s
force. Their boat moves but slowly, we are by in a flash. The naked
orange figures form but one picture, one posture against the blackness,
a living red group from the black urns of Greece; seen, gone; and the
darkness drops down in thick curtains all around.
Swiftly the water rushes, silent, the rhythmic breathing of black
night. The darkness deepens, deepens; then cracks. A thin, thin slit
parts black from black, and slowly grows a narrow streak of faintest
grey.
It is light; light like the thinnest edge of a sword set in the
far distance. But the crack broadens, widens, rounds, and grows by
imperceptible degrees into an open archway, showing the bright water
and the green hills beyond. And swiftly we rush towards the light,
while the little picture no bigger than the reflection on a camera
grows curves and outlines, swells here, retreats there, and passes from
a flat reflection into a rounded reality.
The tunnel itself is no longer black. The walls, the rounded roof, lie
like shadows, deep brown, growing quickly greyer. And above, on either
side, the bats are clinging thickly, in long rows.
We shoot into the light and see that walls and boat are covered with
a fluttering half-dead mass of ghost-grey moths. They coat the tunnel
from wall to roof, they lie in struggling heaps on boat and carpet, our
clothes are full of them.
With one last swift glide we are out of the grey shadow, out under the
blue sky. The green hills rise on either side, the water dimples in the
sun. Slowly the grey moths flutter back to the darkness. For through
the heart of the mountain Lake Biwa has come to Kyoto.
IX
THE INLAND SEA
The little steamer lay tilted up against the end of the pier, for all
the waters of the ocean were rushing madly through the Straits of
Shimonoseki into the Inland Sea. The waters lay encircled as a lake,
for the space between the inner and the outer strait is narrow, but
they ran swift as a mountain river. The square-sailed junks, all sails
set, were racing down the stream in the very eye of the wind, while
those coming up with a strong breeze behind them hardly seemed to stir.
And the little steamer at the end of the pier tilted herself up higher
and higher.
She was a foreign-built boat, though only about the size of a launch,
but she looked like a Moorish house afloat, for all the boat was
cabin, and all the deck was roof, whitewashed, ribbed roof, with a
striped awning. As we left the pier and struck the full force of the
current, the striped awning and the uneven deck dipped down and down
until the Moorish roof turned Gothic. We were in the full force of the
current now, and tearing down the stream with, as somebody said, “all
our engines going the wrong way.” Up the side of the boat the water
climbed, pulling it down with long strong hands, until the flat deck
was turned to a gable roof.
For five breathless minutes we balanced between air and water, and then
we were through the inner strait which turns the waters of the Inland
Sea between Moji and Shimonoseki into one big lake, and the coast of
the South Island began to fall away. The tide was running less swiftly
now, the ridge of our gable roof sank slowly into the water, and the
little steamer floated a white, flat-roofed, Moorish house once more.
“There is nothing,” said the steward, “for the _Ijin San_ to eat.”
He had been standing behind us, balancing himself on the steep gable
roof, for some while, but the current and the laws of gravitation had
been absorbing all our attention, and like a true Japanese he was much
too polite to interrupt.
“There is nothing, nothing,” said he, “to eat.”
For the rare missionary, or the rarer tourist, who patronises the
coasting steamer of the Inland Sea comes provided as for an Arctic
expedition.
“But we shall eat Japanese food,” we explained.
He bowed, a low, polite bow, but I do not think he believed us. Then he
went away, and returned bearing foreign cups with saucers, full of a
hot brown liquor called, he told us triumphantly, “coffee.” It was of
the kind bought ready mixed in cakes, and made with hot water. We were
pleased to know it _was_ coffee, and the attention touched us, still,
Japanese tea would have tasted better. We thought the pinky-brown soup
flavoured with orange peel, the fried fish with chestnut preserve, the
custard stuffed with shrimps, and the bowls of rice eaten with salted
plums and spiced roots off which we dined infinitely preferable; and
the steward who fanned us with one hand, and served us with the other,
saw that there was “something for us to eat.”
It was eight o’clock when we climbed the steep ladder which led to our
Moorish roof, eight o’clock on a July evening, and already the tall,
deep-dented mountains of Kyushu lay dark and indistinct. They lay cut
sharp against a twilight sky as though they had no thickness. And
slowly the coast-line fell away grey into the sea. Kyushu was dying as
the ship and sun moved on, Shikoku was but a blur upon the ocean, and
between them the open sea made a pathway to the sky, all silver-grey
and trembling, a road of light to that sunken light beyond.
The sun had set, and the fleeting twilight of the East was night
already. Japan’s green hills were turning grey. Night held sky and
islands fast, but the pathway shone and trembled until it died in the
last long streaks of light on the edge of the horizon. Night was come.
* * * * *
From Kobé to Shimonoseki stretch the two hundred and forty miles of
the Inland Sea; and in it are gathered together most of the islands
of Japan. Continuous as a mainland the coast of the big island runs
down, while on the other side Kyushu and Shikoku with ancient Awaji,
the firstborn of the Gods, dip their high green mountains in the sea;
between, in lines and clusters, lie thousands upon thousands of baby
islands; some large enough to hold a village, others too small for a
single house; some green with trees and rice-fields, others a mere
speck of rock reaching up out of the water. From morning until night
we sat under the striped awning of our roof top, and watched as they
glided past, green islands on the blue water; and always on our left
hand the tall, deep-dented mountains of the mainland ran on and on.
In the morning sunlight Miyajima’s granite _torī_ stood knee-deep in
the pale blue waves. Its temple roofs were brown against the dark,
green pines, and the sacred island, where neither Birth nor Death may
come, slept blue-black with shadows in the dawn.
And still they glided by, the green islands on the blue water. The sun
travelled up the sky; it grew hot--hotter.
At mid-day we had reached the narrow channel, where mainland and island
are so close that the sea is but a canal between the houses; and the
children of the two villages throw stones across the stream. Here, at
the end of the passage, a great stone lantern stands deep in the idle
water. Then, abruptly, as we turned, the canal was gone; and the wide,
blue sea lay shimmering among the green islands in the summer sun.
Under the striped awning of our roof-top it was cool, but outside the
sun was smiting sea and land, until sea and islands quivered, quivered,
losing themselves, colour and outline, in one mist of shimmering,
shadowy blue. And the ship and the sun travelled on.
* * * * *
Five sturdy naval cadets shared our luncheon with us, and knew the
number and the tonnage of England’s smallest gunboats, and for all
their blue uniform and “foreign” dirk, their _Sayonara_ as they left us
were courteous with an old-time courtesy.
And the sun grew hot and hotter. The light like a mist wrapt sea and
islands round. The continuous quivering hurt. On the other side the
deep-dented mountains of the mainland, grown bare and scraped now,
caught the sunshine on their rocky patches, and sent it in glittering
arrows of light across the still air. And yet in the brown villages,
at the mountains’ feet, the blue-tuniced, brown-legged peasants were
working in the sun; and at each stopping-place the bareheaded men and
women came off in boats to offer their fruit and _saké_ in long-handled
fishing-nets, scent-bottles full of _saké_ flavoured with plum-blossom,
_saké_ flavoured with chrysanthemum or peach-blossom, white rice,
“woman’s” _saké_, _saké_ to ward off old age, or all and any of the
nine different kinds of _saké_ for which Tomotsu is famous, and all in
scent-bottles, artistically tied up and labelled, and costing, bottle
and all, _is-sen_. One old lady was highly indignant when after much
excitement we had contrived to haul up in the fishing-net the exact
scent-bottle we coveted, and had sent her down one sen in return,
for the patois of the district makes _is-sen_ of _jis-sen_ (10 sen =
2½_d._), to the unaccustomed ear.
And the ship and the sun travelled on.
* * * * *
As the shadows grew the quivering ceased, the light no longer like
a veil of darkness hid the land and sea. The islands grew a gradual
green, as they drowsed on the clear blue water. And slowly the still
sea opened wider; the islands passed more slowly until they ceased to
pass at all; and then on the blue water there grew that indefinite look
of ocean space. The Inland Sea was ending. Away on the still sweep of
waters lay Awaji, the First-born of the Gods, the Eden of Japan.
“And when,” says the legend, “the first man and the first woman met
after they had journeyed round a pillar set upon the land the woman
cried, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely man!’ Whereupon the
man, displeased that language had been invented by a woman, required
the circuit to be made again, that he might speak first. So again
they journeyed round the pillar, and again they met, and loudly the
man cried out, ‘How joyful a thing it is to meet a lovely woman!’ And
thus,” says the chronicle, “was Speech invented, and the Art of Love
and the human race begun.”
Dim grey on a grey sea lay Awaji; before us stretched the broad sweep
of the landless ocean; the Inland Sea, dreaming among its islands, lay
behind.
THE LAND OF THE GODS
“That which I saw seemed to me a smile of the Universe.”
“Paradiso,” canto xxvii.
I
ACROSS THE LAGOON
We sat still on the deck, with our backs propped against portions of
the ship’s cargo, and watched.
It was necessary to sit still, for a rise of only a few inches would
have sent the awning over our heads into the blue waters of the lagoon;
and each newcomer, as he stepped from the wharf on to this Kensington
Garden craft, doubled himself in two and stayed so. First-class
passengers lay flat, for a square hole in the side of the boat opened
into a three-feet-high saloon elegantly carpeted; we had matting. When
the first half of the passenger was inside, a big-headed boy removed
his _gheta_ and piled them up on the deck, reshoeing him in the same
way when he emerged. The difficulty of extracting foreign boots in this
manner would alone have deterred us from using our first-class tickets;
and then the deck passengers under the awning had at least six inches
more room, besides ventilation. So we sat on the matting and watched.
Anything out of a toy-shop so tiny as this absurd little steamer was
never seen. She might with generosity have been fifteen feet long; yet
she carried some twenty passengers besides cargo down the lagoon and up
the river, from Matsué to Shobara, with safety and Oriental speed; and
did it twice a day too.