Part 7

A pair of teahouses, rivals, crowned the summit of the pass, which, like most Japanese passes, was a mere knife-edge of earth. With a quickened pulse if a slackened gait, I topped the crest, walked --straight past the twin teahouses and their importunities to stop-- another half-dozen paces to the brink, and in one sweep looked down over a thousand feet on the western side. Noto, eyelashed by the branches of a tree just breaking into leaf, lay open to me below.

After the first glow of attainment, this initial view was, I will confess, disillusioning. Instead of what unfettered fancy had led me to expect, I saw only a lot of terraced rice-fields backed by ranges of low hills; for all the world a parquet in green and brown tiles. And yet, as the wish to excuse prompted me to think, was this not, after all, as it should be? For I was looking but at the entrance to the land, its outer hallway, as it were; Nanao, its capital, its inland sea, all its beyond was still shut from me by the nearer hills. And feeling thus at liberty to be amused, I forthwith saw it as a satire on panoramas generally.

Panoramic views are painfully plain. They must needs be mappy at best, for your own elevation flattens all below it to one topographic level. Field and woodland, town or lake, show by their colors only as if they stood in print; and you might as well lay any good atlas on the floor and survey it from the lofty height of a footstool. Such being the inevitable, it was refreshing to see the thing in caricature. No pains, evidently, had been spared by the inhabitants to make their map realistic. There the geometric lines all stood in ludicrous insistence; any child could have drawn the thing as mechanically.

The two teahouses were well patronized by wayfarers of both sexes, resting after their climb. Some simply sipped tea, chatting; others made a regular meal of the opportunity. The greater number sat, as we did, on the sill, for the trouble of taking off their straw sandals. Our landlady was the model of what a landlady should be, for it was apparently a feminine establishment. If there was a man attached to it, he kept himself discreetly in the background. She was a kind, sympathetic soul, with a word for every one, and a deliberateness of action as effective as it was efficient. And in the midst of it all, she kept up a refrain of welcomes and good-bys, as newcomers appeared or old comers left. The unavoidable preliminary exercise and the crisp air whetted all our appetites. So I doubt not she drove a thriving trade, although to Western ideas of value her charges were infinitesimally small.

Midday halts for lunch are godsends to tramps who travel with porters. They compel the porters to catch up, and give the hirer opportunity to say things which at least relieve him, if they do no good. I had begun to fear ours would deprive me of this pleasure, and indeed had got so far on in my meal as to care little whether they did, when automatically they appeared. Fortunately they needed but a short rest, and as the descent on the Noto side was much steeper than on the other, half an hour's walk brought us to the level of kuruma once more.

A bit of lane almost English in look, bowered in trees and winding delightfully like some human stream, led us to a teahouse. While we were ordering chaises a lot of children gathered to inspect us, thus kindly giving us our first view of the natives. They looked more open-eyed than Japanese generally, but such effect may have been due to wonder. At all events, the stare, if it was a stare, seemed like a silent sort of welcome.

Leaving the children still gazing after us we bowled away toward Nanao, and in the course of time caught our first glimpse of it from the upper end of a sweep of meadows. It sat by the water's edge at the head of a landlocked bay, the nearer arm of the inland sea; and an apology for shipping rode in the offing. It seemed a very fair-sized town, and altogether a more lively place than I had thought to find. Clearly its life was as engrossing to it as if no wall of hills notching the sky shut out the world beyond. Having heard, however, that a watering-place called Wakura was the sight of the province, and learning now that it was but six miles further, we decided, as it was yet early in the afternoon, to push on, and take the capital later. We did take it later, very much later the next night, than was pleasing.

Wakura, indeed, was the one thing in Noto, except the charcoal, which had an ultra-Noto-rious reputation. Rumors of it had reached us as far away as Shinshiu, and with every fresh inquiry we made as we advanced the rumors had gathered strength. Our informants spoke of it with the vague respect accorded hearsay honor. Clearly, it was no place to pass by.

The road to it from Nanao was not noteworthy, but for two things; one officially commended to sight-seers, the other not. The first was a curious water-worn rock upon the edge of the bay, some waif of a boulder, doubtless, since it stuck up quite alone out of the sand. A shrine perched atop, and a larger temple encircled it below, to which its fantastic cuttings served as gateway and garden. The uncommended sight was a neighboring paddyfield, in which a company of frogs, caught trespassing, stood impaled on sticks a foot high, as awful warnings to their kind. Beyond this the way passed through a string of clay cuttings following the coast, and in good time rolled us into the midst of a collection of barnlike buildings which it seemed was Wakura.

The season for the baths had not yet begun, so that the number of people at the hotels was still quite small. Not so the catalogue of complaints for which they were visited. The list appalled me as I sat on the threshold of my prospective lodging, listening to mine host's encomiums on the virtues of the waters. He expatiated eloquently on both the quantity and quality of the cures, quite unsuspicious that at each fresh recommendation he was in my eyes depreciating his own wares. Did he hope that among such a handsome choice of diseases I might at least have one! I was very near to beating a hasty retreat on the spot. For the accommodation in Japanese inns is of a distressingly communistic character at best, and although at present there were few patients in the place, the germs were presumably still there on the lookout for a victim.

Immediate comfort, however, getting the better of problematical risk, I went in. The room allotted me lay on the ground floor just off the garden, and I had not been there many minutes before I became aware, as one does, that I was being stared at. The culprit instantly pretended, with a very sheepish air, to be only taking a walk. He was the vanguard of an army of the curious. The people in the next room were much exercised over the new arrival, and did all decency allowed to catch a glimpse of me; for which in time they were rewarded. Visitors lodged farther off took aimless strolls to the verandas, and looked at me when they thought I was not looking at them. All envied the servants, who out-did Abra by coming when I called nobody, and then lingering to talk. Altogether I was more of a notoriety than I ever hope to be again; especially as any European would have done them as well. My public would have been greater, as I afterwards learned, if Yejiro had not been holding rival court in the kitchen.

Between us we were given a good deal of local information. One bit failed to cause me unmitigated delight. We were not, it appeared, the first foreigners to set foot in Wakura. Two Europeans had, in a quite uncalled-for way, descended upon the place the summer before, up to which time, indeed, the spot had been virgin to Caucasians. Lured by the fame of the springs, these men had come from Kanazawa in Kaga, where they were engaged in teaching chemistry, to make a test of the waters. I believe they discovered nothing startling. I could have predicted as much had they consulted me beforehand. They neglected to do so, and the result was they came, saw and conquered what little novelty the place had. I was quite chagrined. It simply showed how betrodden in these latter days the world is. There is not so much as a remote corner of it but falls under one of two heads; those places worth seeing which have already been seen, and those that have not been seen but are not worth seeing. Wakura Onsen struck me as falling into the latter halves of both categories.

While discussing my solitary dinner I was informed by Yejiro that some one wished to speak with me, and on admitting to be at home, the local prefect was ushered in. He came ostensibly to vise my passport, a duty usually quite satisfactorily performed by any policeman. The excuse was transparent. He really came that he might see for himself the foreigner whom rumor had reported to have arrived. As a passport on his part he presented me with some pride the bit of autobiography that he had himself once been in Tokyo; a fact which in his mind instantly made us a kind of brothers, and raised us both into a common region of superiority to our surroundings. He asked affectionately after the place, and I answered as if it had been the one thought in both our hearts. It was a pleasing little comedy, as each of us was conscious of its consciousness by the other. Altogether we were very friendly.

Between two such Tokyoites it was, of course, the merest formality to vise a passport, but being one imposed by law he kindly ran his eye over mine. As it omitted to describe my personal appearance in the usual carefully minute manner, as face oval, nose ordinary, complexion medium, and so forth, identification from mere looks was not striking. So he had to take me on trust for what I purported to be, an assumption which did not disconcert him in the least. With writing materials which he drew from his sleeve, he registered me then and there, and, the demands of the law thus complied with to the letter, left me amid renewed civilities to sleep the sleep of the just.

An Inland Sea.

They had told us overnight that a small steamer plied every other day through Noto's unfamed inland sea, leaving the capital early in the morning, and touching shortly after at Wakura. As good luck would have it, the morrow happened not to be any other day, so we embraced the opportunity to embark in her ourselves. On her, it would be more accurate to say, for she proved such a mite that her cabin was barely possible and anything but desirable. By squatting down and craning my neck I peered in at the entrance, a feat which was difficult enough. She was, in truth, not much bigger than a ship's gig; but she had a soul out of all proportion to her size. The way it throbbed and strained and set her whole little frame quivering with excitement, made me think every moment that she was about to explode. The fact that she was manned exclusively by Japanese did not entirely reassure me.

There was an apology for a deck forward, to which, when we were well under way, I clambered over the other passengers. I was just sitting down there to enjoy a comfortable pipe when I was startlingly requested by a voice from a caboose behind to move off, as I was obscuring the view of the man at the wheel. After that I perched on the gunwale.

We steamed merrily out into the middle of the bay. The water was slumberously smooth, and under the tawny haze of the morning it shone with the sheen of burnished brass. From the gentle plowing of our bow it rolled lazily to one side, as if in truth it were molten metal. Land, at varying picturesque distances, lay on all sides of us. In some directions the shore was not more than a mile and a half off; in others, the eye wandered down a vista of water framed by low headlands for ten miles or more. But the atmosphere gave the dominant thought, a strange slumber-like seclusion. So rich and golden, it shut this little corner of the world in a sort of happy valley of its own, and the smoke from my pipe drifted dreamily astern, a natural incense to the spirits of the spot.

The passengers suggested anything, from a public picnic to an early exploration party. There were men, women and children of all ages and kinds, some stowed away in the cabin behind, some gathered in groups amidships; and those in the cabin thought small fry of those on deck. The cabin was considered the place of honor because the company made one pay a higher price for the privilege of its discomfort. Altogether it was a very pretty epitome of a voyage.

Just as the steamer people were preparing for their first landing, there detached itself from the background of trees along the shore the most singular aquatic structure I think I have ever seen. It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest. Four poles planted in the water inclined to one another at such an angle that they crossed three-quarters of the way up. The projecting quarters held in clutch a large wicker basket like the car of a balloon. Peering above the car was a man's head. As the occupant below slowly turned the head to keep an eye on us, it suggested, amid its web of poles, some mammoth spider lying in wait for its prey.

It was a matter of some wonder at first how the man got there, until the motion of the steamer turned the side and disclosed a set of cross poles lashed between two of the uprights, forming a rude sort of ladder. Curiosity, satisfied on this primary point, next asked why he got there. As this was a riddle to me, I propounded it to Yejiro, who only shook his head and propounded it to somebody else; a compliment to the inquiry certainly, if not to my choice of informant. This somebody else told him the man was fishing. Except for the immobility of the figure, I never saw a man look less like it in my life.

Such, however, was the fact. The wigwam was connected by strings to the entrance of a sort of weir, and the man who crouched in the basket was on the lookout for large fish, of a kind called bora. As soon as one of them strayed into the mouth of the net, the man pulled the string which closed the opening. The height of his observatory above the level of the water enabled him to see through it to the necessary depth. I am a trifle hazy over the exact details of the apparatus, as I never saw a fish inquisitive enough to go in; but I submit the existence of the fishermen in proof that it works.

Having deposited such wights as wished to go ashore--for the place was of no pretension--our steam fish once more turned its tail and darted us through some narrows into another bay. It must have been a favorite one with bora, as its shores were dotted with fish-lookouts. The observatories stood a few stone-throws out in deepish water, at presumably favorable points, and never very near one another, lest they should interfere with a possible catch. Some were inhabited, some not.

This bay was further remarkable for a solar halo which I chanced to see on glancing up at the sun. I suppose it was the singular quality of the light that first caused me to look overhead. For a thin veil of cloud had drawn over the blue and tempered the sunshine peculiarly. Of course one is familiar with caricatures of the thing in meteorological books; but the phenomenon itself is not so common, and the effect was uncanny. At the first glance it seemed a bit of Noto witchery, that strangely luminous circle around the sun. To admire the moon thus bonneted, as the Japanese say, is common enough, and befits the hour. But to have the halo of the night hung aloft in broad day is to crown sober noon with enchantment.

The sheet of water was sparsely dotted with sail. One little craft in particular I remember, whose course bore her straight down upon us. She dilated slowly out of the distance, and then passed so close I might have tossed a flower aboard of her. So steady her motion she seemed oblivious to our presence, as she glided demurely by at relatively doubled speed.

Only after we had passed did she show signs of noticing us at all. For, meeting our wake, the coquette, she suddenly began dropping us curtseys in good-by.

XI.

Anamidzu.