My
Baggage Horse Showed Great Fury After He Was Unloaded.
He attacked
people right and left with his teeth, struck out savagely with his
fore feet, lashed out with his hind ones, and tried to pin his
master up against a wall.
Leaving this fractious scene we struck again through the mountains.
Their ranges were interminable, and every view from every fresh
ridge grander than the last, for we were now near the lofty range
of the Aidzu Mountains, and the double-peaked Bandaisan, the abrupt
precipices of Itoyasan, and the grand mass of Miyojintake in the
south-west, with their vast snow-fields and snow-filled ravines,
were all visible at once. These summits of naked rock or dazzling
snow, rising above the smothering greenery of the lower ranges into
a heaven of delicious blue, gave exactly that individuality and
emphasis which, to my thinking, Japanese scenery usually lacks.
Riding on first, I arrived alone at the little town of Nozawa, to
encounter the curiosity of a crowd; and, after a rest, we had a
very pleasant walk of three miles along the side of a ridge above a
rapid river with fine grey cliffs on its farther side, with a grand
view of the Aidzu giants, violet coloured in a golden sunset.
At dusk we came upon the picturesque village of Nojiri, on the
margin of a rice valley, but I shrank from spending Sunday in a
hole, and, having spied a solitary house on the very brow of a hill
1500 feet higher, I dragged out the information that it was a tea-
house, and came up to it. It took three-quarters of an hour to
climb the series of precipitous zigzags by which this remarkable
pass is surmounted; darkness came on, accompanied by thunder and
lightning, and just as we arrived a tremendous zigzag of blue flame
lit up the house and its interior, showing a large group sitting
round a wood fire, and then all was thick darkness again. It had a
most startling effect. This house is magnificently situated,
almost hanging over the edge of the knife-like ridge of the pass of
Kuruma, on which it is situated. It is the only yadoya I have been
at from which there has been any view. The villages are nearly
always in the valleys, and the best rooms are at the back, and have
their prospects limited by the paling of the conventional garden.
If it were not for the fleas, which are here in legions, I should
stay longer, for the view of the Aidzu snow is delicious, and, as
there are only two other houses, one can ramble without being
mobbed.
In one a child two and a half years old swallowed a fish-bone last
night, and has been suffering and crying all day, and the grief of
the mother so won Ito's sympathy that he took me to see her. She
had walked up and down with it for eighteen hours, but never
thought of looking into its throat, and was very unwilling that I
should do so.
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