Then a grey gateway opened, and we rode into a yard
of grey gravel, with some silent rooms opening upon it. The
solitude of the thirty or forty rooms which lie between it and the
kitchen, and which are now filled with nets and fishing-tackle, was
something awful; and as the wind swept along the polished passage,
rattling the fusuma and lifting the shingles on the roof, and the
rats careered from end to end, I went to the great black daidokoro
in search of social life, and found a few embers and an andon, and
nothing else but the stupid-faced man deploring his fate, and two
orphan boys whose lot he makes more wretched than his own. In the
fishing-season this barrack accommodates from 200 to 300 men.
I started to the sea-shore, crossing the dreary river, and found
open sheds much blackened, deserted huts of reeds, long sheds with
a nearly insufferable odour from caldrons in which oil had been
extracted from last year's fish, two or three Aino huts, and two or
three grand-looking Ainos, clothed in skins, striding like ghosts
over the sandbanks, a number of wolfish dogs, some log canoes or
"dug-outs," the bones of a wrecked junk, a quantity of bleached
drift-wood, a beach of dark-grey sand, and a tossing expanse of
dark-grey ocean under a dull and windy sky. On this part of the
coast the Pacific spends its fury, and has raised up at a short
distance above high-water mark a sandy sweep of such a height that
when you descend its seaward slope you see nothing but the sea and
the sky, and a grey, curving shore, covered thick for many a lonely
mile with fantastic forms of whitened drift-wood, the shattered
wrecks of forest-trees, which are carried down by the innumerable
rivers, till, after tossing for weeks and months along with
" - wrecks of ships, and drifting
spars uplifting
On the desolate, rainy seas:
Ever drifting, drifting, drifting,
On the shifting
Currents of the restless main;"
the "toiling surges" cast them on Yubets beach, and
"All have found repose again."
A grim repose!
The deep boom of the surf was music, and the strange cries of sea-
birds, and the hoarse notes of the audacious black crows, were all
harmonious, for nature, when left to herself, never produces
discords either in sound or colour.
LETTER XXXV - (Continued)
The Harmonies of Nature - A Good Horse - A Single Discord - A Forest -
Aino Ferrymen - "Les Puces! Les Puces!" - Baffled Explorers - Ito's
Contempt for Ainos - An Aino Introduction.
SARUFUTO.
No! Nature has no discords. This morning, to the far horizon,
diamond-flashing blue water shimmered in perfect peace, outlined by
a line of surf which broke lazily on a beach scarcely less snowy
than itself.
