Comfort disappears - Fine Scenery - An Alarm - A Farm-house - An
unusual Costume - Bridling a Horse - Female Dress and Ugliness -
Babies - My Mago - Beauties of the Kinugawa - Fujihara - My Servant -
Horse-shoes - An absurd Mistake.
FUJIHARA, June 24.
Ito's informants were right. Comfort was left behind at Nikko!
A little woman brought two depressed-looking mares at six this
morning; my saddle and bridle were put on one, and Ito and the
baggage on the other; my hosts and I exchanged cordial good wishes
and obeisances, and, with the women dragging my sorry mare by a
rope round her nose, we left the glorious shrines and solemn
cryptomeria groves of Nikko behind, passed down its long, clean
street, and where the In Memoriam avenue is densest and darkest
turned off to the left by a path like the bed of a brook, which
afterwards, as a most atrocious trail, wound about among the rough
boulders of the Daiya, which it crosses often on temporary bridges
of timbers covered with branches and soil. After crossing one of
the low spurs of the Nikkosan mountains, we wound among ravines
whose steep sides are clothed with maple, oak, magnolia, elm, pine,
and cryptomeria, linked together by festoons of the redundant
Wistaria chinensis, and brightened by azalea and syringa clusters.
Every vista was blocked by some grand mountain, waterfalls
thundered, bright streams glanced through the trees, and in the
glorious sunshine of June the country looked most beautiful.
We travelled less than a ri an hour, as it was a mere flounder
either among rocks or in deep mud, the woman in her girt-up dress
and straw sandals trudging bravely along, till she suddenly flung
away the rope, cried out, and ran backwards, perfectly scared by a
big grey snake, with red spots, much embarrassed by a large frog
which he would not let go, though, like most of his kind, he was
alarmed by human approach, and made desperate efforts to swallow
his victim and wriggle into the bushes. After crawling for three
hours we dismounted at the mountain farm of Kohiaku, on the edge of
a rice valley, and the woman counted her packages to see that they
were all right, and without waiting for a gratuity turned homewards
with her horses. I pitched my chair in the verandah of a house
near a few poor dwellings inhabited by peasants with large
families, the house being in the barn-yard of a rich sake maker. I
waited an hour, grew famished, got some weak tea and boiled barley,
waited another hour, and yet another, for all the horses were
eating leaves on the mountains. There was a little stir. Men
carried sheaves of barley home on their backs, and stacked them
under the eaves. Children, with barely the rudiments of clothing,
stood and watched me hour after hour, and adults were not ashamed
to join the group, for they had never seen a foreign woman, a fork,
or a spoon.
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