Part 12

We stood in a narrow roofless cave whose sides were overhanging rock, whose floor was lava ash, wet with big rain pools. This was the old crater. Asama has three craters, and two are at present in disuse. We were sheltering in one of these. It was a still haven of refuge after the fury of the wind outside, and a sure. There were no cracks, no sticky sucking lava here. With relief as from a heavy burden we sat down upon the wet ash to rest and eat, the lantern in our midst.

It was now 3 o’clock. Since midnight we had been climbing, our clothes were soaked and heavy with rain and cinders, and we were very tired. The boy prosaically unpacked the hamper, and by the flickering light he set out plates and food. But before we could take one mouthful, the wind rushed down the roofless cave, upset the hamper, swept the lantern along the ash before it, tore like a whirlwind from end to end, and left us in an unearthly livid darkness that lighted nothing.

For a moment we all stayed numbed, then the boy sought the remnants of his lantern and we the remnants of our meal. They were both embedded in thick lava dust.

We could not go on up the crater now, for every minute the wind blew fiercer, and the paper lantern was torn in several places. We must wait for the dawn to show us the way. So we huddled under the shelter of the overhanging rock and waited.

The livid darkness that lay upon the mountain grew more livid and less dark to our watching eyes, till we could distinguish the faint outlines of things, though not the things themselves. It was, oh! so cold, and that sense of stagnant terror, dispersed for a little by the wind and the food, crept back and back, intenser, dumber than before.

* * * * *

Then the mountain rumbled in its depths, and the sound of pouring 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.