They Said If We Hurried We Could Just Get To The Hamlet They Had Left, They Thought; But While They Spoke The Road And The Bridge Below Were Carried Away.

They insisted on lashing me to the pack-saddle.

The great stream, whose beauty I had formerly admired, was now a thing of dread, and had to be forded four times without fords. It crashed and thundered, drowning the feeble sound of human voices, the torrents from the heavens hissed through the forest, trees and logs came crashing down the hillsides, a thousand cascades added to the din, and in the bewilderment produced by such an unusual concatenation of sights and sounds we stumbled through the river, the men up to their shoulders, the horses up to their backs. Again and again we crossed. The banks being carried away, it was very hard to get either into or out of the water; the horses had to scramble or jump up places as high as their shoulders, all slippery and crumbling, and twice the men cut steps for them with axes. The rush of the torrent at the last crossing taxed the strength of both men and horses, and, as I was helpless from being tied on, I confess that I shut my eyes! After getting through, we came upon the lands belonging to this village - rice-fields with the dykes burst, and all the beautiful ridge and furrow cultivation of the other crops carried away. The waters were rising fast, the men said we must hurry; they unbound me, so that I might ride more comfortably, spoke to the horses, and went on at a run. My horse, which had nearly worn out his shoes in the fords, stumbled at every step, the mago gave me a noose of rope to clutch, the rain fell in such torrents that I speculated on the chance of being washed off my saddle, when suddenly I saw a shower of sparks; I felt unutterable things; I was choked, bruised, stifled, and presently found myself being hauled out of a ditch by three men, and realised that the horse had tumbled down in going down a steepish hill, and that I had gone over his head. To climb again on the soaked futon was the work of a moment, and, with men running and horses stumbling and splashing, we crossed the Hirakawa by one fine bridge, and half a mile farther re-crossed it on another, wishing as we did so that all Japanese bridges were as substantial, for they were both 100 feet long, and had central piers.

We entered Ikarigaseki from the last bridge, a village of 800 people, on a narrow ledge between an abrupt hill and the Hirakawa, a most forlorn and tumble-down place, given up to felling timber and making shingles; and timber in all its forms - logs, planks, faggots, and shingles - is heaped and stalked about. It looks more like a lumberer's encampment than a permanent village, but it is beautifully situated, and unlike any of the innumerable villages that I have ever seen.

The street is long and narrow, with streams in stone channels on either side; but these had overflowed, and men, women, and children were constructing square dams to keep the water, which had already reached the doma, from rising over the tatami. Hardly any house has paper windows, and in the few which have, they are so black with smoke as to look worse than none. The roofs are nearly flat, and are covered with shingles held on by laths and weighted with large stones. Nearly all the houses look like temporary sheds, and most are as black inside as a Barra hut. The walls of many are nothing but rough boards tied to the uprights by straw ropes.

In the drowning torrent, sitting in puddles of water, and drenched to the skin hours before, we reached this very primitive yadoya, the lower part of which is occupied by the daidokoro, a party of storm-bound students, horses, fowls, and dogs. My room is a wretched loft, reached by a ladder, with such a quagmire at its foot that I have to descend into it in Wellington boots. It was dismally grotesque at first. The torrent on the unceiled roof prevented Ito from hearing what I said, the bed was soaked, and the water, having got into my box, had dissolved the remains of the condensed milk, and had reduced clothes, books, and paper into a condition of universal stickiness. My kimono was less wet than anything else, and, borrowing a sheet of oiled paper, I lay down in it, till roused up in half an hour by Ito shrieking above the din on the roof that the people thought that the bridge by which we had just entered would give way; and, running to the river bank, we joined a large crowd, far too intensely occupied by the coming disaster to take any notice of the first foreign lady they had ever seen.

The Hirakawa, which an hour before was merely a clear, rapid mountain stream, about four feet deep, was then ten feet deep, they said, and tearing along, thick and muddy, and with a fearful roar,

"And each wave was crested with tawny foam, Like the mane of a chestnut steed."

Immense logs of hewn timber, trees, roots, branches, and faggots, were coming down in numbers. The abutment on this side was much undermined, but, except that the central pier trembled whenever a log struck it, the bridge itself stood firm - so firm, indeed, that two men, anxious to save some property on the other side, crossed it after I arrived. Then logs of planed timber of large size, and joints, and much wreckage, came down - fully forty fine timbers, thirty feet long, for the fine bridge above had given way. Most of the harvest of logs cut on the Yadate Pass must have been lost, for over 300 were carried down in the short time in which I watched the river.

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