Noto: An Unexplored Corner Of Japan Part 6

On the morrow morning we took the road in kuruma, the road proper, as Yejiro called it; for it was the main bond between Noto and the rest of j.a.pan. This was the nearest approach it had to a proper name, a circ.u.mstance which showed it not to be of the first importance.

For in j.a.pan, all the old arteries of travel had distinctive names, the Nakasendo or Mid-Mountain road, the Tokaido or Eastern Sea road, and so forth. Like certain other country relations, their importance was due to their city connections, not to their own local magnitude.

For, when well out of sight of the town, they do not hesitate to shrink to anything but imposing proportions. In mid career you might often doubt yourself to be on so celebrated a thoroughfare. But they are always delightful to the eye, as they wander through the country, now bosomed in trees among the mountains, now stalking between their own long files of pine, or cryptomeria, across the well-tilled plains.

This one had but few sentinels to line it in the open, but lost little in picturesqueness for its lack of pomp. It was pretty enough to be very good company itself.

It was fairly patronized by wayfarers to delight the soul; cheerful bodies, who, though journeying for business, had plenty of time to be happy, and radiated content. Take it as you please, the j.a.panese people are among the very happiest on the face of the globe, which makes them among the most charming to meet.

Nothing notable beyond such pleasing generalities of path and people lay in our way, till we came to a place where a steep and perfectly smooth clay bank shot from a spur of the hills directly into the thoroughfare. Three urchins were industriously putting this to its proper use, coasting down it, that is, on the seats of what did them for breeches. An over-grown-up regard for my own trousers alone deterred me from instantly following suit. No such scruples prevented my abetting them, however, to the extent of a trifling bribe for a repet.i.tion. For they had stopped abashed as soon as they found they had a public. Regardless of maternal consequences, I thus encouraged the sport. But after all, was it so much a bribe as an entrance fee to the circus, or better yet, a sort of subsidy from an ex-member of the fraternity? Surely, if adverse physical circ.u.mstances preclude profession in person, the next best thing is to become a n.o.ble patron of art.

From this accidental instance, I judged that boys in Noto had about as good a time of it as boys elsewhere; the next sight we chanced upon made me think that possibly women did not. We had hardly parted from the coasters on dry ground when we met in the way with a lot of women harnessed to carts filled with various merchandise, which they were toilsomely dragging along towards Nanao. It was not so picturesque a sight as its s.e.x might suggest. For though the women were naturally not aged, and some had not yet lost all comeliness of feature, this womanliness made the thing the more appealing. Noto was evidently no Eden, since the local Adam had thus contrived to shift upon the local Eve so large a fraction of the primal curse.

It was as bad as the north of Germany. The female porters we had been offered on the threshold of the province were merely symptomatic of the state of things within. I wonder what my young j.a.panese friend, the new light, to whom I listened once on board ship, while he launched into a diatribe upon the jinrikisha question, the degrading practice, as he termed it, of using men for horses,--I wonder, I say, what he would have said to this! He was a quixotic youth, at the time returning from abroad, where he had picked up many new ideas.

His proposed applications of them did him great credit, more than they are likely to win among the cla.s.s for whom they were designed.

A cent and two thirds a mile, to be had for the running for it, is as yet too glittering a prize to be easily foregone.

Of the travel in question, we were treated to forty-three miles'

worth that day, by relays of runners. The old men fell off gradually, to be replaced by new ones, giving our advance the character of a wave, where the particles merely oscillated, but the motion went steadily on. The oscillations, however, were not insignificant in amount. Some of the men must have run their twenty-five miles or more, broken only by short halts; and this at a dog-trot, changed of course to a slower pull on bad bits, and when going up hill. A fine show of endurance, with all allowances.

In this fashion we bowled along through a smiling agricultural landscape, relieved by the hills upon the left, and with the faintest suspicion, not amounting to a scent, of the sea out of sight on the right. The day grew more beautiful with every hour of its age.

The blue depths above, tenanted by castles of cloud, granted fancy eminent domain to wander where she would. Even the road below gave free play to its caprice, and meandered like any stream inquisitively through the valley, visiting all the villages within reach, after a whimsical fashion of its own. All about it, meadows were tilling, and the whole landscape breathed an air of well-established age, amid the l.u.s.tiness of youth. The very farmhouses looked to have grown where they stood, as indeed the upper part of them had. For from the thatch of their roofs, deep bedded in mud, sprang all manner of plants that made of the eaves gardens in the air. The ridgepoles stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of gra.s.s waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the pa.s.sers-by. What a contented folk this should be whose very homes can so vegetate! Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to life again!

At the threshold of Kaga we turned abruptly to the left, and attacked the pa.s.s leading over into Etchiu. As we wound our way up the narrow valley, day left the hollows to stand on rosy tiptoe on the sides of the hills, the better to take flight into the clouds. There it lingered a little, folding the forests about with its roseate warmth.

Even the stern old pines flushed to the tips of their s.h.a.ggy branches, while here and there a bit of open turned a glowing cheek full to the good-night kiss of the sun. And over beyond it all rose the twilight bow, in purplish insubstantiality creeping steadily higher and higher, above the pine-clad heights.

I reached the top before the jinrikisha, and as a sort of reward of merit scrambled a little farther up the steep slope to the left.

From here I commanded the pa.s.s, especially that side of it I had not come up. The corkscrew of the road carried the eye most pleasingly down with it. I could see a teahouse a few hundred feet below, and beyond it, at a much lower level, a bridge. Beyond this came a comparatively flat stretch, and then the road disappeared into a gorge. Here and there it was pointed with people toiling slowly up.

Of the encircling hills the shoulders alone were visible. While I was still surveying the scene, the jinrikisha men, one after the other, emerged from the gulf out of sight on the right and proceeded to descend into the one on the left. When the last had well pa.s.sed, and I had tickled myself with the sense of abandonment, I scrambled back, took a jump into the road and slipped down after them. The last had waited for me at the teahouse, and stowing me in started to rattle down the descent. The road, unlike us, seemed afraid of its own speed, and brought itself up every few hundred feet with a round turn. About each of these we swung, only to dash down the next bend, and begin the oscillation over again. The men were in fine excitement, and kept up a shouting out of mere delight. In truth we all enjoyed the dissipated squandering in a few minutes of the energy of position we had so laboriously gained by toiling up the other side. Over the bridge we rattled, bowled along the level stretch, and then into the gorge and once more down, till in another ten minutes the last fall had shot us out into the plain with mental momentum enough to carry us hilariously into Imaisurugi, where we put up for the night.

At breakfast the next morning the son of the house, an engaging lad, presented me with an unexpected dish, three fossil starfish on a platter. They were found, he said, in numbers, on the sides of the hill hard by; a fact which would go to prove that this part of j.a.pan has been making in later geologic time. Indeed, I take it the better part of Etchiu has thus been cast up by the sea, and now lies between its semicircle of peaks and its crescent of beach, like a young moon in the western sky, a new bay of ricefield in the old bay's arms.

We had come by way of its ocean terminator along its fringe of sand; we were now to cross its face.

As we pulled out from the town and entered the great plain of paddyfields it was like adventuring ourselves in some vast expanse of ocean, cut up only by islets of trees. So level the plain and so still the air on this warm May morning, the clumps shimmered in mirage in the distance like things at sea. Farmhouses and peasants at work in the fields loomed up as ships, past which we slowly tacked and then dropped them out of sight behind. And still no end of the same infinite level. New clumps rose doubtfully afar, took on form and vanished in their turn. Our men rolled along at a good six-knot gait, and mile went to join mile with little perceptible effect on the surroundings. Only the misty washes of the mountains, glistening in spots with snow, came out to the south and then swung slowly round like the sun himself. Occasionally, we rolled into a village of which I duly inquired the distance from the last known point. One of these, Takaoka, was a very large place and stretched a mile or more along the road, with ramifications to the side.

At last we neared some foothills which we crossed by a baby pa.s.s, and from the farther side looked off against the distant Tateyama range.

Descending again, another stretch of plain brought us to Toyama, the old feudal capital of the province. It is still a bustling town, and does a brisk business, I was told, in patent medicine, which is hawked over j.a.pan generally and cures everything. But the former splendor of the place has left it forever. The rooms in the inn, where neighboring daimyos were wont to rest on their journeys through, are still superb with carving, lacquer and paintings, but no daimyo will ever again hold his traveling court before their tokonoma.

The man perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has gone to join the past. Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the breeding of those about him disillusion his midday dream.

The castle they have turned into a public school; and as I strolled into its close I met bands of boys in foreign lycee-like uniform trooping out; chubby-faced youngsters in stiff visored caps. Girls there were too, in knots of twos and threes, pretty little things in semi-European dress, their hair done a la grecque, stuck with a single flower, who stopped in their chatter to stare at me. To think that the feudal times are to them as much a tale as the making of the plain itself where its ruins stand already mantled with green!

XIV.

The Harinoki Toge.

There now befell us a sad piece of experience, the result of misplaced confidence in the guidebook. Ours was the faith a simple public pins upon print. Le journal, c'est un jeune homme, as Balzac said, and even the best of guidebooks, as this one really was, may turn out--a cover to many shortcomings.

Its description of the crossing of the Harinoki toge implied a generality of performances that carried conviction. If he who read might not run, he had, at least, every a.s.surance given him that he would be able to walk. That the writer might not only have been the first to cross, but the last, as well, was not evident from the text.

Nor was it there apparent that the path which was spoken of as difficult and described as "hanging to the precipitous side of the cliff," might have become tired of hanging thus for the sake of travelers who never came, and have given itself over at last to the abyss.

In the book, the dead past still lived an ever-youthful present.

In truth, however, the path at the time of the account, some twelve years before, had just been made by the samurai of Kaga to join them to the capital. Since then the road by the sea had been built, and the Harinoki pa.s.s had ceased to be in practice what it purported to be in print. It had in a double sense reverted to type. There was small wonder at this, for it was a very Cerberus of a pa.s.s at best, with three heads to it. The farthest from Etchiu was the Harinoki toge proper.

The guidebook and a friend had gone over one season, and the guidebook had induced another friend to accompany him again the year after.

Whether there were any unpersonally conducted ascents I am not sure.

But at any rate, all this happened in the early days; for years the Harinoki toge had had rest.

We ought to have taken warning from the general skepticism we met with at Toyama, when we proposed the pa.s.s. But with the fatal faith of a man in his guidebook, we ignored the native forebodings.

Besides, there were just people enough who knew nothing about it, and therefore thought it could be done, to encourage us in our delusion.

Accordingly we left Toyama after lunch in the best of spirits, in jinrikisha, for Kamidaki, or Upper Fall, to which there professed to be a jinrikisha road. The distance was three ri, seven miles and a half. Before we had gone one of them the road gave out, and left us to tack on foot in paths through the rice-fields, which in one long inclination kept mounting before us. Just before reaching the village, a huge tree in full faint purple bloom showed up a little to the left.

Under a sudden attack of botanical zeal, I struck across lots to investigate, and after much tacking among the paddy d.y.k.es found, to my surprise, on reaching it, that the flowers came from a huge wistaria that had coiled itself up the tree. The vine must have been at least six feet round at the base, and had a body horribly like an enormous boa that swung from branches high in air. The animal look of the vegetable parasite was so lifelike that one both longed and loathed to touch it at the same time.

At Kamidaki, after the usual delay, we found porters, who echoed the doubts of the people of Toyama, and went with us protesting. Half an hour after this we came to the Jindogawa, a river of variable importance. It looked to have been once the bed of a mighty glacier that should have swept grandly round from unseen fastnesses among the hills. At the time of our visit, it was, for the most part, a waste of stones through which two larger and several lesser streams were in much worry to find their way to the sea. The two larger were just big enough to be unfordable; so a Charon stationed at each ferried the country folk across. At the smaller, after picking out the likeliest spots, we took off our shoes and socks and waded, and then, upon the other side, sat some time on stones, ill-modeled to that end, to draw our things on again.

Our way now led up the left bank--the right bank, according to aquatic convention, which pleasingly supposes you to be descending the stream. It lay along a plateau which I doubt not to have been the river's prehistoric bed, so evidently had the present one been chiseled out of it to a further depth of over fifty feet. At first the path struck inland, astutely making a chord to the river's bow, an unsuspected sign of intelligence in a path. It was adventurous, too, for soon after coming out above the brink, it began upon acrobatic feats in which it showed itself nationally proficient.

A narrow aqueduct had been cut out of the side of the cliff, and along its outer embankment, which was two feet wide, the path proceeded to balance. The aqueduct had given way in spots, which caused the path to take to some rickety boards put there for its benefit. After this exhibition of daring, it descended to the stream, to rise again later.

Meanwhile night came on and the river bottom began to fill with what looked to be mist, but was in reality smoke. This gave a weird effect to the now mountainous settings. Into the midst of it we descended to a suspension bridge of twisted strands of the wistaria vine, ballasted at the ends with boulders piled from the river's bed.

The thing swayed cheerfully as we pa.s.sed over.

On the top of the opposite bank stood perched a group of houses, not enough to make a village, and far too humble to support an inn.

But in their midst rose a well-to-do temple, where, according to the guidebook, good lodging was to be had. It may indeed be so. For our part we were not so much as granted entry. An acolyte, who parleyed with us through the darkness, reported the priest away on business, and refused to let us in on any terms. Several bystanders gathered during the interview, and had it not been for one of them we might have been there yet. From this man we elicited the information that another hamlet lay half a mile further up, whose head-man, he thought, might be willing to house us. We followed straight on until some buildings showed in still blacker silhouette against the black sky, and there, after some groping in the dark and a second uncanny conversation through a loophole,--for the place was already boarded up for the night,--we were finally taken in.

The house was a generous instance of a mountain farmhouse.

The floors were innocent of mats, and the rooms otherwise pitiably barnlike. Yet an air of largeness distinguished the whole. It was clearly the home of a man of standing in his community, one who lived amply the only life he knew. You felt you already knew the man from his outer envelope. And this in some sort prepared me for a little scene I was shortly to witness. For while waiting for Yejiro to get dinner ready I became aware that something was going on in what stood for hall; and on pushing the shoji gently apart I beheld the whole household at evening prayers before an altar piece, lighted by candles and glittering with gilded Buddhas and bronze lotus flowers.

The father intoned the service from a kind of breviary, and the family joined from time to time in the responses. There was a sincerity and a sweet simplicity about the act that went to my heart and held me there. At the close of it the family remained bowed while the intoner reverently put out the lights and folded the doors upon the images within. Locked in that little case lay all the luxury which the family could afford, and to which the rest of the house was stranger. There is something touching in any heartfelt belief, and something pathetic too.

This peaceful parenthesis was hardly past before the trials of travel intruded themselves again. The porters proved refractory. They had agreed to come only as far as they could, and now they refused to proceed further. Here was a pretty pa.s.s. To turn back now was worse than not to have set out at all. Besides, we had not yet even come in sight of the enemy. Yejiro reasoned with them for some hours in the kitchen, occasionally pausing for lack of further argument to report his want of progress. It seemed the men valued their lives above a money consideration, strangely enough. They made no bones about it; the thing was too dangerous. The streams they declared impa.s.sable, and the charcoal burners the only men who knew the path.

Yejiro at once had these witnesses subpoenaed, and by good luck one of them came, who, on being questioned, repeated all the porters had said. But Yejiro's blood was up, and he boldly played his last trump. He threatened them with the arm of the law, a much more effective weapon in j.a.pan than elsewhere. He proposed, in fine, to walk three ri down the valley to the nearest police station and fetch a policeman who should compel them to move on. It is perhaps open to doubt whether even a j.a.panese policeman's omnipotence would have extended so far. But the threat, though not conclusive, had some effect. This strategic stroke I only learnt of later, and I laughed heartily when I did. That night, however, it was no laughing matter, and I began to have doubts myself. But it was no time for misgivings, so I went in to help. The circle round the kitchen fire was not a cheerful sight. To have the courage of one's convictions is rare enough in this weak world, but to have the courage of one's doubts is something I uncover to. To furnish pluck for a whole company including one's self; to hearten others without letting them see how sore in need of heartening is the heartener, touches my utmost admiration. If only another would say to him that he might believe the very things he does not believe, as he says them to that other; they then might at least seem true. Ignorance saved me. Had I known what they did, I should have agreed with them on the spot.

As it was, I did what I could, and went back to my own room, the prey of somewhat lonely thoughts.

XV.

Toward the Pa.s.s.

I was waked by good news. The porters had, to a certain extent, come round. If we would halve their burdens by doubling their number, they would make an attempt on the pa.s.s, or, rather, they would go on as far as they could. This was a great advance. To be already moving implies a momentum of the mind which carries a man farther than he means. I acquiesced at once. The recruits consisted of the master of the house--his father, the officiator at family prayers, had retired from the cares of this world--and a peasant of the neighborhood. The charcoal burners were too busy with their own affairs. From the sill, as I put on my boots, I watched with complacence the cording of the loads, and then, with quite a lightsome gait, followed the lengthened file out into the street.

One after the other we tramped forth past the few houses of the place, whose people watched us go, with the buoyant tread of those about to do great things, and so out into the open.

The path appeared very well. It trotted soberly along across a mountain moor until it came out above the river. It then wound up stream, clinging to the slope several hundred feet above the valley bottom. It was precipitous in places, but within reason, and I was just coming to consider the accounts exaggerated when it descended to the river bed at a point where a b.u.t.t of neve stuck a foot into the shingle. The stream, which had looked a thread from above, turned out a torrent when we stood upon its brink. The valley was nothing but river bed, a ma.s.s of boulders of all sizes, through the midst of which the stream plunged with deafening roar, and so deep that fording was out of the question. A man's life would not have been worth a rush in it.

We followed up the boulder bank in search of a more propitious spot.

Then we followed down again. Each place promised at a distance, and baulked hope at hand. At last, in despair, we came to a halt opposite the widest and shallowest part, and after no end of urging, one of the porters stripped, and, armed with his pole, ventured in.

The channel lay well over to the farther side; thrice he got to its nearer edge and thrice he turned back, as the rush of water became too great. His life was worth too much to him, he said, not unnaturally, for him to throw it away. Yet cross the stream we must, or return ignominiously; for the path we had so far followed had fallen over the cliff in front.

We improved the moments of reflection to have lunch. While we were still discussing viae and viands, and had nearly come to the end of both, we suddenly spied a string of men defiling slowly down through the wide boulder desert on the other side. We all rose and hailed them. They were so far away that at first they failed to hear us, and even when they heard they stared vacantly about them like men who hear they know not what. When at last they caught sight of us, we beckoned excitedly. They consulted, apparently, and then one of them came down to the edge of the stream. The torrent made so much noise that our men could make themselves intelligible only in part, and that by bawling at the top of their lungs. Through the envoy, they invited the band to string themselves across the stream and so pa.s.s our things over. The man shook his head. We rose to fabulous sums and still he repeated his pantomime. It then occurred to Yejiro that a certain place lower down might possibly be bridged, and beckoning to the man to follow, he led the way to the spot in mind. A boulder, two-thirds way in stream, seemed to offer a pier. He tried to shout his idea, but the roar of the torrent, narrow though it was, drowned his voice; so, writing on a piece of paper: "What will you take to build us a bridge?" he wrapped the paper round a stone and flung it over. After reading this missive, the spokesman held a consultation with his friends and a bargain was struck. For the huge sum of two yen (a dollar and a half), they agreed to build us a bridge, and at once set off up the mountain side for a tree.

The men, it seemed, were a band of wood-cutters who had wintered, as was their custom, in a hut at Kurobe, which was this side of the Harinoki toge, and were just come out from their hibernation.

They were now on their way to Ashikura, where they belonged, to report to their headman, obtain supplies and start to return on the after-morrow. It was a two-days' journey either out or in.

Bridges, therefore, came of their trade. The distance across the boulder bed was considerable, and as they toiled slowly up the face of the opposite mountain, they looked like so many ants. Picking out a trunk, they began to drag it down. By degrees they got it to the river bed, and thence eventually to the edge of the stream. To lay it was quite a feat of engineering. With some pieces of drift-wood which they found lying about, they threw a span to the big boulder, and from the boulder managed to get the trunk across. Then, with rope which they carried at their girdles, they lashed the whole together until they had patched up a very workmanlike affair.