Soon
After We Came Upon A Little Tea-House, And The Ainos Showed Me A
Straw Package, And Pointed To Their Open Mouths, By Which I
Understood That They Wished To Stop And Eat.
Later we overtook
four Japanese on horseback, and the Ainos raced with them for a
considerable distance, the result of these spurts being that I
reached Tomakomai at noon - a wide, dreary place, with houses roofed
with sod, bearing luxuriant crops of weeds.
Near this place is the
volcano of Tarumai, a calm-looking, grey cone, whose skirts are
draped by tens of thousands of dead trees. So calm and grey had it
looked for many a year that people supposed it had passed into
endless rest, when quite lately, on a sultry day, it blew off its
cap and covered the whole country for many a mile with cinders and
ashes, burning up the forest on its sides, adding a new covering to
the Tomakomai roofs, and depositing fine ash as far as Cape Erimo,
fifty miles off.
At this place the road and telegraph wires turn inland to
Satsuporo, and a track for horses only turns to the north-east, and
straggles round the island for about seven hundred miles. From
Mororan to Sarufuto there are everywhere traces of new and old
volcanic action - pumice, tufas, conglomerates, and occasional beds
of hard basalt, all covered with recent pumice, which, from Shiraoi
eastwards, conceals everything. At Tomakomai we took horses, and,
as I brought my own saddle, I have had the nearest approach to real
riding that I have enjoyed in Japan.
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