There Were Swampy Lakes, With Wild Ducks And
Small White Water-Lilies, And The Surrounding Levels Were Covered
With Reedy Grass, Flowers, And Weeds.
The early autumn has
withered a great many of the flowers; but enough remains to show
how beautiful the now russet plains must have been in the early
summer.
A dwarf rose, of a deep crimson colour, with orange,
medlar-shaped hips, as large as crabs, and corollas three inches
across, is one of the features of Yezo; and besides, there is a
large rose-red convolvulus, a blue campanula, with tiers of bells,
a blue monkshood, the Aconitum Japonicum, the flaunting Calystegia
soldanella, purple asters, grass of Parnassus, yellow lilies, and a
remarkable trailer, whose delicate leafage looked quite out of
place among its coarse surroundings, with a purplish-brown
campanulate blossom, only remarkable for a peculiar arrangement of
the pistil, green stamens, and a most offensive carrion-like odour,
which is probably to attract to it a very objectionable-looking
fly, for purposes of fertilisation.
We overtook four Aino women, young and comely, with bare feet,
striding firmly along; and after a good deal of laughing with the
men, they took hold of the kuruma, and the whole seven raced with
it at full speed for half a mile, shrieking with laughter. 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. The wife of a Satsuporo
doctor was there, who was travelling for two hundred miles astride
on a pack-saddle, with rope-loops for stirrups. She rode well, and
vaulted into my saddle with circus-like dexterity, and performed
many equestrian feats upon it, telling me that she should be quite
happy if she were possessed of it.
I was happy when I left the "beaten track" to Satsuporo, and saw
before me, stretching for I know not how far, rolling, sandy
machirs like those of the Outer Hebrides, desert-like and lonely,
covered almost altogether with dwarf roses and campanulas, a
prairie land on which you can make any tracks you please. Sending
the others on, I followed them at the Yezo scramble, and soon
ventured on a long gallop, and revelled in the music of the thud of
shoeless feet over the elastic soil; but I had not realised the
peculiarities of Yezo steeds, and had forgotten to ask whether mine
was a "front horse," and just as we were going at full speed we
came nearly up with the others, and my horse coming abruptly to a
full stop, I went six feet over his head among the rose-bushes.
Ito looking back saw me tightening the saddle-girths, and I never
divulged this escapade.
After riding eight miles along this breezy belt, with the sea on
one side and forests on the other, we came upon Yubets, a place
which has fascinated me so much that I intend to return to it; but
I must confess that its fascinations depend rather upon what it has
not than upon what it has, and Ito says that it would kill him to
spend even two days there. It looks like the end of all things, as
if loneliness and desolation could go no farther. A sandy stretch
on three sides, a river arrested in its progress to the sea, and
compelled to wander tediously in search of an outlet by the height
and mass of the beach thrown up by the Pacific, a distant forest-
belt rising into featureless, wooded ranges in shades of indigo and
grey, and a never-absent consciousness of a vast ocean just out of
sight, are the environments of two high look-outs, some sheds for
fish-oil purposes, four or five Japanese houses, four Aino huts on
the top of the beach across the river, and a grey barrack,
consisting of a polished passage eighty feet long, with small rooms
on either side, at one end a gravelled yard, with two quiet rooms
opening upon it, and at the other an immense daidokoro, with dark
recesses and blackened rafters - a haunted-looking abode. One would
suppose that there had been a special object in setting the houses
down at weary distances from each other. Few as they are, they are
not all inhabited at this season, and all that can be seen is grey
sand, sparse grass, and a few savages creeping about.
Nothing that I have seen has made such an impression upon me as
that ghostly, ghastly fishing-station.
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