It
Is Walled In By High Mountains, Gloriously Wooded And Cleft By Dark
Ravines, Down Which Torrents Were Tumbling In
Great drifts of foam,
crashing and booming, boom and crash multiplied by many an echo,
and every ravine afforded glimpses
Far back of more mountains,
clefts, and waterfalls, and such over-abundant vegetation that I
welcomed the sight of a gray cliff or bare face of rock. Along the
path there were fascinating details, composed of the manifold
greenery which revels in damp heat, ferns, mosses, confervae,
fungi, trailers, shading tiny rills which dropped down into
grottoes feathery with the exquisite Trichomanes radicans, or
drooped over the rustic path and hung into the river, and overhead
the finely incised and almost feathery foliage of several varieties
of maple admitted the light only as a green mist. The spring tints
have not yet darkened into the monotone of summer, rose azaleas
still light the hillsides, and masses of cryptomeria give depth and
shadow. Still, beautiful as it all is, one sighs for something
which shall satisfy one's craving for startling individuality and
grace of form, as in the coco-palm and banana of the tropics. The
featheriness of the maple, and the arrowy straightness and
pyramidal form of the cryptomeria, please me better than all else;
but why criticise? Ten minutes of sunshine would transform the
whole into fairyland.
There were no houses and no people. Leaving this beautiful river
we crossed a spur of a hill, where all the trees were matted
together by a very fragrant white honeysuckle, and came down upon
an open valley where a quiet stream joins the loud-tongued
Kinugawa, and another mile brought us to this beautifully-situated
hamlet of twenty-five houses, surrounded by mountains, and close to
a mountain stream called the Okawa. The names of Japanese rivers
give one very little geographical information from their want of
continuity. A river changes its name several times in a course of
thirty or forty miles, according to the districts through which it
passes. This is my old friend the Kinugawa, up which I have been
travelling for two days. Want of space is a great aid to the
picturesque. Ikari is crowded together on a hill slope, and its
short, primitive-looking street, with its warm browns and greys, is
quite attractive in "the clear shining after rain." My halting-
place is at the express office at the top of the hill - a place like
a big barn, with horses at one end and a living-room at the other,
and in the centre much produce awaiting transport, and a group of
people stripping mulberry branches. The nearest daimiyo used to
halt here on his way to Tokiyo, so there are two rooms for
travellers, called daimiyos' rooms, fifteen feet high, handsomely
ceiled in dark wood, the shoji of such fine work as to merit the
name of fret-work, the fusuma artistically decorated, the mats
clean and fine, and in the alcove a sword-rack of old gold lacquer.
Mine is the inner room, and Ito and four travellers occupy the
outer one.
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