第28章 On the Noto Highway(2)

The blue depths above, tenanted by castles of cloud, granted fancy eminent domain to wander where she would. Even the road below gave free play to its caprice, and meandered like any stream inquisitively through the valley, visiting all the villages within reach, after a whimsical fashion of its own. All about it, meadows were tilling, and the whole landscape breathed an air of well-established age, amid the lustiness of youth. The very farmhouses looked to have grown where they stood, as indeed the upper part of them had. For from the thatch of their roofs, deep bedded in mud, sprang all manner of plants that made of the eaves gardens in the air. The ridgepoles stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of grass waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the passers-by. What a contented folk this should be whose very homes can so vegetate! Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to life again!

At the threshold of Kaga we turned abruptly to the left, and attacked the pass leading over into Etchiu. As we wound our way up the narrow valley, day left the hollows to stand on rosy tiptoe on the sides of the hills, the better to take flight into the clouds. There it lingered a little, folding the forests about with its roseate warmth.

Even the stern old pines flushed to the tips of their shaggy branches, while here and there a bit of open turned a glowing cheek full to the good-night kiss of the sun. And over beyond it all rose the twilight bow, in purplish insubstantiality creeping steadily higher and higher, above the pine-clad heights.

I reached the top before the jinrikisha, and as a sort of reward of merit scrambled a little farther up the steep slope to the left.

From here I commanded the pass, especially that side of it I had not come up. The corkscrew of the road carried the eye most pleasingly down with it. I could see a teahouse a few hundred feet below, and beyond it, at a much lower level, a bridge. Beyond this came a comparatively flat stretch, and then the road disappeared into a gorge. Here and there it was pointed with people toiling slowly up.

Of the encircling hills the shoulders alone were visible. While Iwas still surveying the scene, the jinrikisha men, one after the other, emerged from the gulf out of sight on the right and proceeded to descend into the one on the left. When the last had well passed, and I had tickled myself with the sense of abandonment, I scrambled back, took a jump into the road and slipped down after them. The last had waited for me at the teahouse, and stowing me in started to rattle down the descent. The road, unlike us, seemed afraid of its own speed, and brought itself up every few hundred feet with a round turn. About each of these we swung, only to dash down the next bend, and begin the oscillation over again. The men were in fine excitement, and kept up a shouting out of mere delight. In truth we all enjoyed the dissipated squandering in a few minutes of the energy of position we had so laboriously gained by toiling up the other side. Over the bridge we rattled, bowled along the level stretch, and then into the gorge and once more down, till in another ten minutes the last fall had shot us out into the plain with mental momentum enough to carry us hilariously into Imaisurugi, where we put up for the night.

At breakfast the next morning the son of the house, an engaging lad, presented me with an unexpected dish, three fossil starfish on a platter. They were found, he said, in numbers, on the sides of the hill hard by; a fact which would go to prove that this part of Japan has been making in later geologic time. Indeed, I take it the better part of Etchiu has thus been cast up by the sea, and now lies between its semicircle of peaks and its crescent of beach, like a young moon in the western sky, a new bay of ricefield in the old bay's arms.

We had come by way of its ocean terminator along its fringe of sand;we were now to cross its face.

As we pulled out from the town and entered the great plain of paddyfields it was like adventuring ourselves in some vast expanse of ocean, cut up only by islets of trees. So level the plain and so still the air on this warm May morning, the clumps shimmered in mirage in the distance like things at sea. Farmhouses and peasants at work in the fields loomed up as ships, past which we slowly tacked and then dropped them out of sight behind. And still no end of the same infinite level. New clumps rose doubtfully afar, took on form and vanished in their turn. Our men rolled along at a good six-knot gait, and mile went to join mile with little perceptible effect on the surroundings. Only the misty washes of the mountains, glistening in spots with snow, came out to the south and then swung slowly round like the sun himself. Occasionally, we rolled into a village of which I duly inquired the distance from the last known point. One of these, Takaoka, was a very large place and stretched a mile or more along the road, with ramifications to the side.

At last we neared some foothills which we crossed by a baby pass, and from the farther side looked off against the distant Tateyama range.

Descending again, another stretch of plain brought us to Toyama, the old feudal capital of the province. It is still a bustling town, and does a brisk business, I was told, in patent medicine, which is hawked over Japan generally and cures everything. But the former splendor of the place has left it forever. The rooms in the inn, where neighboring daimyos were wont to rest on their journeys through, are still superb with carving, lacquer and paintings, but no daimyo will ever again hold his traveling court before their tokonoma.

The man perchance may again tarry there, but the manner of it all has gone to join the past. Now he who wills may ensconce himself in the daimyo's corner, and fancy himself a feudal lord; nor will the breeding of those about him disillusion his midday dream.

The castle they have turned into a public school; and as I strolled into its close I met bands of boys in foreign lycee-like uniform trooping out; chubby-faced youngsters in stiff visored caps. Girls there were too, in knots of twos and threes, pretty little things in semi-European dress, their hair done a la grecque, stuck with a single flower, who stopped in their chatter to stare at me. To think that the feudal times are to them as much a tale as the making of the plain itself where its ruins stand already mantled with green!