Chapter III: Part 3

and past cottages with hedges of pink and white hibiscus; but after a few miles it begins to get steeper, the ashes are less disintegrated, cultivation only appears in isolated spots, and there are large stretches of gray moorland varied only with bushes and wild-flowers. The mist still hung round us, there was no landscape to be seen in any direction, and if it had not been for the flowers and the ever-new and quaint figures on the road, this part of the walk would have been dull. Besides the regular pilgrims there were many men and women leading pack-horses, those on their way up carrying provisions and fuel for the rest-houses, and those coming down bringing bundles of grass so large that they looked like walking hay-stacks, and the wiry little ponies that carried them were almost invisible. In front a misshapen head peeped out, underneath were four thin little legs with enormous feet, and as they passed, their narrow drooping quarters, cat-hammed and cow-hocked, swayed at every step under the heavy load. Japanese drawings of horses have risen in my estimation since I have seen the models the artists have to work from; there never was a more ill-shaped beast than the ordinary horse of the country. In this as in many other hill districts mares only are used; they are shod with big straw over-shoes, which give a finishing touch to their ludicrous shape; under them is slung a square of dark-blue cotton cloth to keep off the flies, and a narrow strip of the same material, with a big crimson cord and tassel printed on it for decoration, is draped across their quarters. Many of the pilgrims ride up as far as the tea-house called Uma-gaeshi (horse send back), and the ponies look almost as much eclipsed under the big pack-saddle with its trappings, and the pilgrim with his, as they do under the loads of grass.

When all cultivation had disappeared, and the road was a mere cinder track over a moorland of ashes, the flowers and bushes still grew in clusters here and there. The most abundant plant was a large bushy knotweed covered with sprays of white blossoms, and this grew far up the mountain-side. There were also clumps of tall bocconia, a campanula with large pink or lavender flowers sprinkled in each bell with tiny ink-spots, and various less showy flowers. The flora on this side of the mountain, devastated by the last eruption, in 1706, is not so rich as that on the northern slope. As the ascent became steeper we got into a wood of dwarfed and scraggy pine-trees, which extended as far as Tarōbō, a large tea-house with a little temple attached, and then suddenly ceased; above this there was only an occasional dead stump to break the monotonous surface of ashes. Here every pilgrim purchases a stick to help him up the mountain--an octagonal staff of birch, about five feet long, with an inscription burned on it, and for a few coppers the priests on duty at the summit will add a red stamp to prove that the owner has actually been there.

We reached the second shelter beyond Tarōbō quite early in the afternoon; great masses of wet mist came constantly driving up the mountain-side; there was plenty of room in the hut, and nothing to be gained by going higher, so we decided to stay there for the night. All the regular tracks up Fuji are divided into ten portions, and a rest-house is supposed to mark the end of each division; but they vary much in their accommodation for travellers, and often get destroyed during the winter, so it is well to find out before starting which are habitable and which are not. Number Two (Ni-go-me), on the Gotemba path, was a roomy hut, built with blocks of lava; from below it looked like a wall with a hole in it, from above it was not visible, for the ashes covering its roof of rough planks were simply a continuation of the mountain slope; there was no chimney, but a mass of snow was piled over the fireplace, which dripped through the roof into a tub and supplied the establishment with water. By each shelter a small white flag fluttered on a pole to make its situation obvious.

Nothing could be more dreary than this spot on such an afternoon: above, below, and on each side the waste of purple-gray ashes, light-green spots of knotweed and thistle, only enforcing the gloom of its color, seemed to stretch interminably into the mist, and nothing broke the monotony of the long oblique line except the little eminence of Hoei-zan, sticking up like a pimple on the great slope of Fuji, which occasionally showed its outline through the vague and formless clouds.

Inside it was, at any rate, warm; the raised floor was covered with coarse matting, and on this quilts were spread, and soon after dark we were all in bed. Some later arrivals had added to our numbers, and we slept thirteen in that hut, including the host and hostess; but this was nothing to the crowd at the top, where I think we were nineteen, perhaps more, for in some parts of the floor there must have been two or three under a quilt, and it was difficult to count them. Even here on Fuji you do not escape the all-seeing eye of the Japanese police; your passport is examined by the keepers of the hut, and is copied into a book which gives every night the names and addresses of those who sleep under the roof. About two o’clock in the morning we were wakened by our host, who took us outside, and there at last was Fuji itself, straight over our heads, every detail softened, but clearly visible, and the summit looking ridiculously near in the brilliant moonlight. Below us was the slope of ashes and the moorland over which we had walked; and in the distance the Hakone Mountains, already far below our level, lay half hidden by masses of moonlit cloud. More energetic men might have started at once for the final climb, but after gazing and shivering for a few minutes we turned into our hard beds again, and it was not till after sunrise that we left our hut, our party increased by a dreary and footsore young soldier in a soiled white uniform, and a cheerful coolie, carrying about a hundred-weight of planks to repair one of the higher shelters.

The path goes zigzagging up to one rest-house after another, and there was not one of them which we failed to patronize; even Number Seven, which was a heap of ruins with nothing in the way of drink but a tub of melted snow, was an excuse for a few minutes’ halt. In the clear morning sunlight Fuji looked small, as most mountains do when there are no clouds to give mystery and suggest height; but it was a grand morning for distant views, and the sunshine brought out vividly the strange and brilliant colors of the various materials which form the mountain--gray ashes, blue lava, and the reds and oranges of burned earth.

Above the seventh station the path turns to the left and passes behind Hoei-zan; already bands of pilgrims, who had seen the sunrise from the summit, were making their way back towards Gotemba, going at a great pace down the glissade of loose sand and ashes on its side, while we toiled on over harder cinders, with an occasional ridge of lava, on the upward path. At this altitude the knotweed and thistles had disappeared, and the only plants I saw were a dwarf sedge and a little starwort in some of the sheltered nooks; higher still only a few lichens and mosses can grow; there is no regular alpine flora on Fuji.

A big gully full of snow lies just below Number Eight, and from this point the ascent is steeper than ever, winding among a chaos of shapeless blocks of lava; a sharp spur on our left crowned with them made a most curious outline against the sky. In front of us was a strange pilgrim, an old and feeble Buddhist priest in canonicals and a big cane hat; two coolies were hauling him by a cord round his waist, and another was pushing from behind, and even with this help he had to stop every few minutes to get his wind. He smiled a sickly smile as we went by; he was even slower than we were, and it seemed cruel to pass him; but he got to the top finally.

A sharp pull up a rocky gully at last brought us to a little wooden torii, and to the “Famous Silver Water,” a clear, cold spring on the edge of the crater. The supply is not large, and the priest in charge of the enclosure doles it out to pilgrims at the rate of one brass cash for a small teacupful. The principal temple, and the cluster of huts round it, form a little square on the south side of the crater, just at the top of the Mura-yama path, and are reached from the Silver Water by means of a couple of ladders and a small fee. At the top of the ladders there is a tiny shrine, serving as stable to a toy model of a horse, and in front of this the coppers are deposited. There are only three entrances to the crater of Fuji, and each of these is marked by a small torii, the sacred gateway of the Shinto religion; two of them I have already mentioned, the third is on the north side, where the paths from Yoshida and Subashiri, which meet at Number Eight station, reach the summit.

Clouds had, as usual, begun to form about mid-day, and there were only occasional peeps of distance, but the crater itself was worthy of the journey, and occupied us until the bitterly cold wind drove us to shelter. Here, as on other mountains, I noticed that the first object of the native is to get under cover; all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them may be spread before his eyes, but if there is a little smoky cabin, however rough and uncomfortable, the professional mountaineer goes inside and stays there. This one was not luxurious; near the doorway, the only aperture for admitting light, there was a smouldering wood-fire, where our food was cooked before we lay down to try and rest on the loose and creaky floor-boards; little blasts came like squirts of cold water through the cracks of the unmortared walls, and it was a relief when a general movement of the sleepers--for a Japanese can apparently sleep anywhere--showed the approach of sunrise.

The morning was clear and bright, and we all crouched in nooks of the rocks, wrapped in our quilts, and gazed at the straight gray line of the Pacific and the gradually brightening line above it, watching for the first sign of the approaching god. On the most prominent rock a priest knelt, waving strips of paper tied to a stick and chanting prayers and eulogies, and soon the sun rose, as he assuredly will every morning, whether he is prayed to or not. There

was such a vast space of mysterious blue sea and distance below the horizon that the big orange ball appeared to be already half-way up the heavens when we first saw it. This daily occurrence seems ever new and wonderful, always has something of the miraculous about it, and to most minds it brings a sense of thankfulness, as the sunset gives that of repose; though why we should feel grateful both that it is time to begin to work and time to leave off is a puzzle to me. My thoughts turned to an early morning near Plevna, and to an honest Turk, who, as the sun rose over the bare Bulgarian hills, turned on his box-seat, and, gravely touching his forehead, wished a good-day to his “little brothers” in the carriage he was driving. There was a mixture of courteousness and solemnity in his manner which seemed exactly suited to the important moment.

When the orange glow had turned to a dazzling glare, we walked round to the foot of Kenga-mine, the highest of the peaks encircling the crater, and looked westward at the shadow of Fuji, a great pyramid of tender blue stretching for miles across the country at its foot, darkening a slice of the sunlit distant mountains, and towering above them into the sky, clearly defined on the light mists and clouds of the horizon. So sharp was the outline that it seemed as if our two shadows ought to show on the distant sky; but though we waved our arms frantically there was no visible movement on the edge; we were too small. When we returned to get some breakfast many of the pilgrims were saying their morning prayers at the little temple. “Sengen Sama” is the goddess of Fuji; a prettier name for her is “Ko no hana saku ya Hime”--“the princess who makes the blossoms of the trees to open.” There is another little temple dedicated to her on the north side of the crater, and many more imposing ones in various parts of Japan. On a banner which floated in front of this second temple there was an inscription in Japanese, and under it these words in English, “Place for worship the Heaven.” I suppose this was an effort in the direction of civilization and rationalism, but I resented it as an attempt to explain away the flower-loving princess, and to dethrone her from the mountain-top where she has been worshipped in peace for so many centuries. Close by the banner is another spring, “The Famous Golden Water,” and a small shed, where bundles of chopsticks and other mementos are sold, and where for ten sen you can buy a tin can full of the famous water to take home to your friends. Most of the descending pilgrims have one or two of these tins slung round them with the rest of their travelling-kit. The regular Fuji pilgrim is dressed in a white tunic with loose sleeves, close-fitting white cotton drawers, white socks and gaiters, and a pair of straw sandals; he wears the usual big hat, which serves as an umbrella, and slung round his shoulders he has a light rush mat, which can be shifted to either side to keep off sun or rain. Round his neck he has a string of beads, a little incessantly tinkling bell, and a few pairs of extra sandals on a cord, and fastened to his waistband is the small package containing his personal baggage; he carries in his hand either the octagonal birch staff or a

longer peeled wand, with some paper tied round the end of it. The dress of the women is the same as that of the men, except that they wear a short petticoat under the tunic, about as long as a Highlander’s kilt. I saw none of them adorned with the bell and beads, so perhaps these are reserved for the men. It is only of late years that women have been allowed to climb the sacred mountain.

No one point of the crater’s edge is high enough to give a panorama; you have to walk all round, about two miles, in order to see the view on every side. Eastward is the country round Yokohama and Tōkyō, with the Pacific beyond as horizon; southward, too, is the ocean, with the Izu Peninsula jutting out into it, and the sweep of Suruga Bay bringing it close under your feet; westward you get a glimpse of the Fujikawa River, with range after range of mountains behind it; and to the northward a chain of little lakes lies at the base of Fuji, these, too, backed up by mountains, which rise, one behind another, as far as you can see.

In some places the outer wall descends abruptly into the crater; in others, as by the Golden Water, there is a narrow plateau between the two. The crater itself is four or five hundred feet deep, the north side mostly precipitous rock, and the south side, under Kenga-mine, a steep slope of snow and débris; all the peaks round it have names, and one of them near the Silver Water is dotted with cairns raised in honor of Jizó, the patron saint of travellers, who helps little children to cross the Buddhist Styx. There is a rough path all round the crater, leading over some of the peaks, inside some, and outside others, which is kept in passable condition by men who collect a few coppers for their labor: the pilgrim season is harvest-time for the dwellers round Fuji, and its barren top pays well for cultivation.

It was after ten o’clock before we had made the circuit and seen all the sights; we met our coolies by the long row of huts at the top of the Yoshida path, and could see the village itself, our destination, lying in the blue hollow below us. Groups of ascending and descending pilgrims were visible for a long distance on the slope; as we looked down on them we saw only big round hats with an arm sticking out, and two little feet working underneath. After a final cup of tea at one of the guest-houses we passed under the wooden torii, and began the descent, a very steep and stony one, the loose cinders and lumps of lava requiring attention at every footstep. At Number Nine station there is a little shrine called “Sengen’s Welcome,” and at Number Eight there are six or eight good-sized huts built on a spur of harder lava, making quite a little village, which can be seen on a clear morning from the foot of the mountain. Here the Subashiri route branches off to the right; ours to Yoshida turned to the left, and we went sliding with long strides down an incline of loose ashes and sand, into which our legs sank up to the knee at every step. It was rapid but fatiguing, and required very high stepping to avoid heavy and ignominious falls. The track is marked by hundreds of cast-off “waraji”--straw sandals--a common object on all Japanese roads, but here especially plentiful. My companion had provided himself in Yokohama with a stock of them, specially made to fit over the European boot; they were carefully adjusted and tied on by our servants and porters, but I noticed that after the first hundred yards they had always worked loose, and after a quarter of a mile they were hanging gracefully round his ankles instead of protecting his feet. The enjoyment of walking depends so much upon foot-gear that I am shy of trying experiments, and I found that my stout boots with plenty of nails served as well on Fuji as on any other mountain. Worn as Japanese wear them, with a thong passing between the big toe and the next, the waraji hold on well; they are soon worn out, or made useless by the breaking of one of the strings of twisted grass which tie them to the ankles; but this does not matter, for new ones can be bought for about a half-penny at any road-side house. This part of Fuji was very desolate, the rocks were formless blocks piled up without any arrangement of line, and the débris was too loose for any plant to find a foothold; but after a few thousand feet a ridge of more solid lava rose on each side of the gully we were descending, and

that on our left soon began to show some vegetation. There were pines and larches, whose dwarfed and twisted forms showed the hardship of their lives, and among them were some flowers too, clusters of a delicate pink rhododendron, crimson wild roses, columbines, clematis, golden-rod, and orange lilies.

The glissade of fine ashes brought us down as far as Number Five station, and there we rejoined the upward path, for no one tries to ascend over this loose stuff. High up in the gully we had seen men digging out snow from under the ashes, and taking it across the flank of the mountain to supply one of the rest-houses on the ridge to our right, and troops of ascending pilgrims were visible now and then as a turn of their path brought them in profile against the sky. Below Number Five there is but one track; it plunges at once into a thick undergrowth of bushes, and after this we had no more desolate wastes of ashes, but a constant succession of trees and flowers, temples, and luxurious rest-houses, gay with the cotton flags presented to them by their patrons. The forest through which this path leads covers a steep ridge of lava; the trees are mostly pine and other conifers, often very fine old specimens, and under them is a tangle of flowering shrubs and plants and of fallen timber. The people we met coming up seemed to appear suddenly under our feet out of the green gloom; one party had always to draw aside while the other passed; at times the path was a stairway of old roots, at others a ditch between high banks, and never wide enough for two to walk abreast. We heard a sound of singing below us, and stood on the bank while about twenty white-clad pilgrims filed by, men of all ages, each with a little bell tinkling at his waist; the front ones chanted a short strain, which those at the back took up and answered, and their song was faintly audible in the woods above us long after the last had disappeared up the winding path. The chant is called “Rokkon shōjō”--the six senses purified--the six, according to the Buddhists, being eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and heart, and it is only sung by the Fuji pilgrims.

At Number Two station we made a long halt, emptied the ashes out of our boots, and washed our feet in the tubs of water which the little servants brought us. It was a very different kind of place from the rough shelter on the Gotemba side; the path came down a few steps as it emerged from the wood, passed under a torii by a small temple, and then spread out into quite a wide space in front of a long tea-house crowded with pilgrims. On the opposite side of this space were three or four platforms, spread with blankets and shaded with matting; these too were occupied by groups of guests, who smoked and drank tea as they rested, and below them the tops of the trees were cut away to give a space of open sky and a view of the distance. Hundreds of little flags were fluttering from long bamboo poles, and at the other end of this lively scene the path went down a few more steps, and became again a narrow track through the dense forest. The flowers all the way were abundant and beautiful, constantly varying as we descended from one zone to another; at last the wood became thinner, and we could get glimpses of the distance, and of the grassy ridges on each side of us, tinged with pale mauve by masses of funkia in blossom; and when we reached the temple and the large open square of the Uma-gaeshi we were at the end of the trees, and before us was a great slope of moorland leading down for miles and miles to the pine grove by Yoshida.

There is but one break in the long walk through flowers and grass--a little tea-house called Naka-no-chaya, whose three pine-trees are distinguishable for a long distance across the moor. All round it there are monumental pillars covered

with inscriptions, which look like tombstones, but were really erected by pilgrims to commemorate the number of ascents which they have made. The variety of plants which grow and flourish on this slope of fine cinders is truly remarkable. The most abundant flower was a pale mauve scabious, which gave a prevailing tint to the whole moorland, but the most conspicuous was a tall, slender day-lily

with a pale yellow flower, which shone like a star in the evening when the color had gone from all the others. A dark purple-blue campanula (_Platycodon grandiflorum_) was also very effective, and a bright crimson pink (_Dianthus superbus_) with beautifully fringed petals. But it would be hopeless to try and enumerate them. I find in a sketchbook a list of fifty-seven which I noted on the way between Naka-no-chaya and Yoshida. A little later in the year this mass of flowers and grass is mown down and carried to the villages at the foot of the mountain.

The last part of our walk was through a grove of grand red pines, which seem to do better on this volcanic soil than anywhere else in Japan, and then across a few fields to the top of the long village street, where we at last found our tea-house and our baggage, and comfortable rooms, and settled down for a night of well-earned repose.

FUJI FROM SUZUKAWA.

Oct. 3, 1892.

Fuji is quite free from clouds this morning, and in the soft autumnal sunshine every detail is clearly visible as I sit with the shutters wide open and eat my breakfast. The foreground is a level plain of rice-fields, which stretches away for three or four miles to where the first gentle ascent is marked by a line of villages and trees, and in some

places, where irrigation is possible, the terraced fields climb a little way up the mountain. Above them is a band of cultivated country, the general effect of it dark green, varied by stripes of paler green fields. At first the forms are sharply defined, but higher up the whole becomes a blue-green mass. Next above this is a band of moorland with no trees on it, lighter and warmer in color, the grasses and plants which cover it tinged with yellow or orange by the autumn. As the morning sun shines on it little blue shadows, in spots and waving lines, mark the undulations of its surface. This belt of moorland reaches to the height of about five thousand feet, and is very rich in flowers. Above it, again, is a great band of forest; the warm color of the deciduous trees at its lower edge gradually merges into the dark blue-green of the pines, which mount a long way up on the summits of the ridges that at this point seam the surface of the mountain. It is over this forest-land that the morning clouds generally begin to form. As I write, a little one, that looks like a puff of white steam, is beginning to float over the trees, and this will grow until in an hour’s time the upper part of Fuji will be invisible. The well-defined gullies are a light orange-red tint, and the contrast between them and the dark pines on the dividing ridges is the strongest opposition of color on Fuji, except that where the snow and the black lava meet at its summit. As the gullies ascend and the pines disappear the color again becomes more uniform, dark gray with a tinge of Indian red, the red disappearing and the gray becoming a rich purple as it runs up in irregular points and lines among the lower snows. Only the very highest band is a solid white; on the left of the truncated top is Kenga-mine, the highest point of the crater’s edge, and next it a flat line shows where the Murayama path enters; to the right of this a well-marked ridge of lava runs high up into the snow, and can be traced down to the moorland, cutting off the Hōeizan portion from the rest of the mountain. Beyond this ridge are two flatter curves--the summits of Jizotaké and Kwannon-také--on the eastern side of the crater. The general outline of the mountain on the left is one simple curve, the almost level line where it begins to ascend from the Fujikawa River becoming steeper and steeper towards the top. The most distinct acceleration of grade is where the forests end and the ridges of lava begin. The outline on the right is broken just above the pine-clad ridges by the projection of Hōeizan, and again at the top of the moorland by another smaller hill--Tsurugi-zan; and the effect on this side is not so much a curve as two inclined planes, the first from Kwannon-také to Hōeizan, the second from there to the moorland, after which it becomes an undulating line of mounds leading away to the Ashitaka range of older mountains. On this right side there is much less variety of color, a sharp ridge of warm orange lava makes a crest to Hōeizan, but the great cup-like hollow behind it and the treeless slope below it are one uniform gray. Nearly two centuries have passed since the eruption which altered this outline of Fuji and destroyed the vegetation, and many more will have to elapse before the ashes are sufficiently disintegrated to entice back the trees and flowers.

SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN

SOME WANDERINGS IN JAPAN

The lakes which lie to the north of Fuji are not much visited by foreigners; they are rather difficult of access, and the accommodation in the tea-houses in that district is not luxurious; but for those who can walk well, and put up with ordinary Japanese food and lodging, the scenery will atone for everything. The old hills on the north once looked over a great sloping plain to the shore of Suruga Bay, but the upstart Fuji arose and blocked their view to the south; streams of lava poured from it, and rolled down till they were stopped by these buttresses of ancient rock, damming the rivers, and so forming this chain of lakes at their base. Where the lava has been covered with fine ashes, vegetation soon begins to conceal the work of destruction, but the larger flows resist all attempts at cultivation; they still stand in wide ridges above the rest of the country, gray lichens cover them, and dwarfed trees find a foothold in the crevices between their blocks. The winding tracks which lead across them are bad enough, for every little hump in the path is not a pebble which rolls aside as your foot touches it, but is a knob of solid rock, and it is your toe that has to give way; the untrodden part of the scrubby forest would stop any animal but an active monkey. We traversed one of the widest flows, called Aoki-ga-hara (green-tree moor), from the number of evergreens which grow over it, on the way between Shoji, the smallest, and Motosu, the largest of the lakes, walking for hours in single file along a narrow trail with hardly an opening anywhere in the dense foliage; it was late in the evening, and the imprecations in Japanese and English ought to have thrown a lurid light on that dusky path. The dividing-line between the lava and the older rock is as clearly visible now as it was on that day when the molten torrent was arrested in its course and piled itself in a solid wave against the immovable hills. Some subterranean settling must still be going on, for a few years ago the lakes began to rise, and they have remained at the higher level, so that as we rowed along the shore we could see below us the roofs of cottages and the fences of rice-fields, and forests of dead pines rose gaunt and bare out of the water. Of all the places I saw in Japan, Motosu seemed the most remote; the rise of the lake must have ruined many of the inhabitants, and a settled gloom seemed to hang over the few charcoal-burners, wood-cutters, and fishermen who remain. We found rooms in an old tea-house, where fine wood-work, now blackened and decayed, showed signs of a former prosperity which will hardly revive unless prices rise, for when we left the next morning the landlord sadly presented us with a bill for nineteen sen (about sixpence), which for two foreigners and two servants came to a very modest sum per head. We crossed the lake by boat, and were landed at the foot of a trackless hill-side, overgrown with tall grasses and wild flowers, through which it was difficult to walk, but our local guides soon found a path which led us in the direction of the Fujikawa. Here we were off the volcanic soil, the beeches and other trees were magnificent, and in one wood we walked between banks of maidenhair fern (_Adiantum pedatum_) growing five or six feet high. How well I remember that day of glorious sunshine, the view back over the lake with Fuji towering

behind it, the mountain road through forests with new trees and plants at every turn, the gaudy butterflies, the long zigzag descent by the pine-clad spur which brought us to the Suzukawa Valley, and the gorgeous sunset as we whirled down the rapids to Shimoyama. There are five lakes in the chain, Motosu, Shoji, Nemba, Kawaguchi, and Yamanaka, and they descend in level from Motosu on the west to Yamanaka on the east. Nemba lies in a hollow of wooded hills, with a couple of partially drowned villages on its shore, in which the cottage roofs are strangely constructed, and the people wear long knickerbockers of blue striped cotton. Kawaguchi is the most beautiful of them all; its waters have only risen a foot or two, so that no damage has been done except the submersion of a few fields, and Funatsu and Kodachi, with picturesque old temples and cottages shaded with gourds, like Jonah’s, are thriving towns compared with the other lake-side hamlets.

I was staying at Yoshida, within easy walking distance of Funatsu, in the early part of September, when all the countryside was keeping the Bon festival in memory of the dead--a sort of Japanese All-Souls day which lasts for a week. Fires were lighted at night on all the hill-sides; the path leading up to every little temple could be traced by a line of blazing spots, and the great lonely slope of Fuji was dotted with them here and there, marking the positions of the rest-houses and the few scattered huts of grass-cutters and charcoal-burners. I have seen the same thing in Switzerland, near Martigny, where on the eve of St. John’s day every cattle-tender far up the mountains greeted his distant neighbors with a bonfire. This part of the ceremony is called, in Japanese, _hi-matsuri_ (fire festival). Other observances are placing offerings of food before the family graves, which in Yoshida were generally at the end of the back garden, and erecting a little altar in the house, on which dishes of rice, fruit, and sweetmeats are laid, and before which prayers are said.

We had a typhoon on the 4th of September, with such torrents of rain and gusts of wind that the houses had to be enclosed with their wooden shutters, and there was nothing to be done but lie on the floor in the darkness and listen to the turmoil of the elements outside. Suddenly, above all the other noises, I heard a monotonous chant, and, opening a crack in my shutters, I saw a procession of men, dressed only in “kasa” and straw rain-coats passing down the village street. Some of them carried big drums slung to poles, on which the others banged, while all of them groaned in unison a sentence which I could not catch. It was a long time before I could induce Matsuba to tell me what it all meant; but at last he confessed that it was done to drive away the storm-demon; he was evidently ashamed of this method of praying for fair weather, and explained that it was only in these out-of-the-way places his countrymen were so superstitious. Anyhow, it was efficacious, for the typhoon blew itself out during the night. There was more or less rain for some days after, but we had nothing again like that day’s downpour, and I started in more promising weather for a walk over the hills to Kofu. From Funatsu I crossed a corner of Kawaguchi, and took a steep mountain road on the other side; some kind of matsuri was going on there too, and the lake was dotted with boatfuls of people beating drums and singing. The road we took is said in the guide-books to be practicable for jinrikishas, but the typhoon had completed the work of destruction which the heavy rains in July had begun, and there were very few yards of it left over which a wheeled vehicle could travel. On the other side of the pass, Misaka-toge, where I stayed to lunch and admire the view of Fuji, and to collect seeds of a grand red lychnis which grew there abundantly, we went through a village, Nakagawa, that had been almost destroyed by a torrent. The street and the gardens were filled with bowlders and gravel and fallen tree trunks, and the roofs only were visible above the mass of wreckage. The well-fitted timbers of a Japanese roof, especially when there is a heavy thatch over them, make it the least destructible part of the house; the lower part may collapse in a typhoon or earthquake, but the roof settles down over the ruins practically uninjured. I saw one near the Tokaido which had been taken off bodily by the wind and deposited in a field the other side of the road without losing its shape. I looked for the river which had done all this damage to Nakagawa, and found only a little, innocent, prattling brook about a yard wide.

Kofu is a busy place in the centre of a large silk-growing district. All the hill-sides around are covered with scrubby-looking mulberry bushes, and in the villages almost every cottage had its pile of golden cocoons, which the women were winding off into skeins as they sat and chattered by their doorways. As you pass Japanese houses in fine weather you see almost everything that is going on inside; they are set down close to the road, and the sliding-screens allow you to look right through to the garden at the back. When it is cold or wet all the wooden shutters are closed, and they have then a very sad and deserted appearance. I went to a very good theatre in Kofu, and afterwards to what might be called a wax-work show, but that the figures were

made of carved and painted wood, where the incidents of the murder of Ii-Kamonno-Kami were represented with a startling fidelity to nature. He was assassinated one winter’s night in the streets of Tōkyō by the retainers of a rival Daimio, and the snowy ground showed to advantage all the details of disembowelled bodies and mangled limbs. The last two figures were mechanical. A retainer kneeling in front of the Daimio slowly opened a bloody handkerchief and showed him the head of his enemy, whereupon the Daimio’s eyebrows went up and the corners of his mouth went down, giving him a most comical expression of horror.

The roads are wider here than in most parts of Japan, and there are comparatively few jinrikishas. Most of the travelling is done in basha, small wagonettes with no springs, which jolt the very life out of you. I engaged one to take me on to Lake Suwa, on the Nakasendo road, a journey of forty miles, and arrived there feeling like an aching jelly. After travelling a few miles from Kofu we came to a river where the bridge had been washed away. I and my baggage were ferried over, and the driver attempted to ford it, but the water was too deep for him, and I was left stranded with my impedimenta on a wide waste of pebbles. Fortunately the man with whom I had made my bargain had foreseen this possibility, and when I could get some coolies to help me with my baggage across half a mile of stones and bowlders, I found another basha waiting for me. All the first part of the journey was a long ascent through wooded, hilly country, with road-side villages at short intervals. In one of them, Tsutaki, where we stopped to change horses, a school treat was going on. The place was gayly decorated with lanterns and arches of leaves and paper flowers, and in the temple court-yard the children had made realistic figures, among them a life-sized tiger, ingeniously constructed with straws of different colors. The low wooden cottages, with broad eaves and stones piled on the top, looked very like Swiss chalets, except that they all had green roof crests, sometimes of iris, but more often of a bunchy kind of lycopodium which the natives called yuwashiba. Almost every one had a screen of bamboo on the south side, with gourds of different kinds growing up it and tumbling over the roof and the out-buildings. At last, with long spells of walking, very welcome as a rest from the weary jolting, we reached the tea-house at the top of the pass, and then rattled down a somewhat better road for about twelve miles, emerging at dusk into the broad mountain-guarded valley in which Suwa lies. The flat lands near the lake are intersected by little streams and canals, along which the peasants go to their work in long, narrow punts, very like those which are used for the same purpose in Picardy--another instance of the way in which similar conditions in widely distant countries lead to similar habits and inventions.

I stayed at Kami-no-suwa in a delightful tea-house, with clean polished wood-work, and quilts covered with a soft thin silk called kaiki, very pleasant and cooling to a mosquito-tortured skin. Cleanliness is the great luxury of the Japanese; their foot-gear is always removed before entering the house, so that the mats may not be soiled; the wood-work is never painted, stained, or varnished, but left with a well-planed surface, which shows its natural color; the ceilings are thin planks, slightly overlapping each other, the grain of each being carefully selected to combine with the lines in those next it; there are no hangings or fixed pieces of furniture to collect the dust, and no carpets to be taken up and shaken, so that spring cleaning, that terror of the Western house-keeper, is unnecessary; the whole room can be swept out every morning, the walls and ceiling rubbed with a duster, and there it is, all as neat as a

new pin. At Shimo-no-suwa, about three miles on, the Koshu-kaido, along which I had been travelling from Kofu, joins the Nakasendo, the central mountain road, one of the main routes between Kyoto and Tōkyō. A new road has been made most of the way, admirably engineered, with gentle gradients, but so badly executed that it had already fallen to pieces in some places, and it was covered with loose road-metal which made jinrikisha travelling very laborious. My men usually preferred the old steep road, which cuts off corners, and is solid though very rough, and after a couple of days I sent back all the jinrikishas except the one which carried my baggage, finding my own legs the best means of conveyance. From the Shiojiri Pass I looked back over Suwa, saw Fuji through the blue haze of a lovely autumn morning, a long way off, but still towering above all the other hills, and then dropped down into a new set of mountains, rivers, and valleys. The scenery of the Nakasendo gets more and more picturesque, until it reaches a climax in the valley of the Kisogawa, on which I first looked from the summit of the Torii Pass, four thousand and odd feet above the sea. Each village on the road had its own peculiarities of costume, architecture, and manufacture--cheap lacquer-ware, combs, pickles, and so on, and of all these Matsuba bought a stock, for it is the habit of every Japanese on his travels to take back with him “meibutsu,” the characteristic productions of the places he has visited, as presents for those he has left at home.

There are many celebrated mountains in this district, each with its own special god and shrines, and I constantly met bands of pilgrims dressed in white, with long staves and big hats, or saw boat-loads of them going down

the Kisogawa in the few places where it is navigable. After some days of glorious weather, with a sun which turned the wings of the myriad dragon-flies hovering over the rivers to spots of light, and made all clothing seem superfluous, I was suddenly arrested by a violent storm at a little village called Suwara. A number of pilgrims had been driven to shelter in the same tea-house; they spent the day in chanting prayers, ringing a little bell, and tapping blocks of wood together to mark the time; and they began it again at three o’clock the next morning, before starting on their trudge. The motive of these pilgrimages is not in the least penitential. Certain hardships have to be endured by every traveller in mountain regions, but the Japanese are good walkers and accustomed to simple living, and in their composition they have a large stock of intelligent curiosity which makes them enjoy all that is new and beautiful in the country through which they pass. The history and literature of their fatherland form a large part of their education, and almost every remarkable spot has some legendary or poetical association apart from its natural beauty; their religion teaches them, too, that not only temples and shrines are sacred, but that every poetic thought or heroic deed, every grand tree or rock or lovely landscape, has in it something of the divine.

On the banks of the Kisogawa, not far from Suwara, there is a large flat rock, which is called Nezame-no-toko, the Bed of Awakening, for here Urashima the fisher-boy, a sort of Japanese Rip Van Winkle, is supposed by some to have returned to real life after his long trance. The usual version of the story is this: Urashima lived with his parents at Yura, by the sea of Japan, helping them in their fishing; but one day his boat did not return, and he was given up for dead. He had met the Sea-god’s daughter, who had taken him away to live with her and love her in an evergreen land. What seemed to him like a few weeks passed by in happiness, but at last he said, “My parents will be sorrowing for me; I must go back and comfort them,” and he prevailed on his princess to spare him for a while. She gave him a casket, saying that as long as he kept it closed she would always be with him, but if he opened it, she and the evergreen land would be lost to him forever. He had really been away for centuries, his home had disappeared, and everything in Yura was changed. In despair he opened the forbidden box, a faint blue mist floated out from it across the sea, he turned from a handsome youth to an old decrepit man, and in a few minutes lay dead upon the shore, for in that box his princess had enclosed all the hours of their happy life.

No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near Midono; the valley narrows and the road in many places overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the vegetation is luxuriant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the road, and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every little breeze which comes down from the mountains through the ravines in which they grow. By the river-side I noticed many fine-leaved plants; some old garden friends, and others new to me; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily from rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires showed that autumn was at hand.

I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it begins to ascend the Magome Pass, and took a little cross-country track, turning eastward again up the valley of the Hirosegawa, which, after two days’ walking, brought me to Iida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was not mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the jinrikisha man who had accompanied me all the way from Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was practicable, and that he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He did

it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help him, and in some places they and Matsuba had to carry kuruma, baggage and all. There was one long climb through a dense wood which particularly impressed me; I walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear the continual cry, “Yo-sha! Yo-sha!” with which the men encouraged each other; the masses of foliage above me, the shrubs and ferns below them, enclosed me in a green maze; from under the arched roots of a colossal cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop and examine the huge toads, seven or eight inches long and almost as broad, that sprawled about on the road-side. When my men overtook me at a tea-house some miles farther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads skinned. They looked as big as the “poulet” of a cheap restaurant, and he told me that they were very good for weakly children.

At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me down the rapids as far as the Tokaido; the river was running high, and they would not do it for less than twenty-four yen--a good price for a journey of only ten or twelve hours; but when you remember that it takes them ten days or a fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem excessive. Don Pedro’s remark, “What need the bridge much wider than the flood?” does not apply to most of the Japanese rivers; usually they are just a trickle of water among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after heavy rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a reservoir for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough water to be navigable. The boats used on it are about thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and flat-sided, with a square stern and a high, pointed bow; they are very loosely built and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough water or shallows. A heavy foot would break through them, and it is necessary to tread only on the bamboos which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs.

My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a seat arranged on it for Matsuba and myself; one man took the long stern oar while the other four worked in the bows, and within a few minutes of the start we were plunging down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the foot of one rapid while the men got breath for the next, and until we stopped for our mid-day meal at the little

village of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do anything but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, between high mountains, down a gorge with such sharp curves that it is often impossible to see any exit, and our boat would rush down, heading straight for a cliff against which the water dashed furiously; while one man in the bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, and just when I thought “we must come to grief this time,” she would suddenly turn and swish round the corner into smoother water. The rapids continued to be amusing, though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain begins; below here the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, divided into several channels by long gravel banks, on which gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe and herons congregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are