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It degenerated indeed very rapidly after losing sight of the town, and soon was no more than a collection of holes strung on ruts, that made travel in perambulators tiring alike to body and soul. At last, after five miles of floundering, it gave up all pretence at a wheel-way, and deposited us at a wayside teahouse at the foot of a little valley, the first step indeed up the Arayama pass.
Wharton was delighted and said so frankly. "Your camp looks as attractive as a teahouse," said he. "You have no idea how gay the red flowers look among these dark pine trees. How came you to think of window-boxes?" "Oh, I don't know," was Ted's reply. "The bits of board suggested it, I guess. Then Collins said the greenhouses were overstocked, and he seemed only too glad to get rid of his plants."
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.
"Then you know what constitutes beauty?" "Not always. What is sponge cake for me may be sawdust for somebody else. Say, I rode for an hour in a 'rickshaw at Nagoya to see the most beautiful girl in Japan and when we got to the teahouse they trotted out a little shrimp that looked as if she'd been dried over a barrel you know, stood bent all the time, as if she was getting ready to jump.
No desert caravan of penance to these Meccas, but a summer's stroll under a summer's sky. An end that sanctifies the means and a means that no less justifies its end. While we were still in the way with these pious folk we touched our midday halt, a wayside teahouse notched in a corner of the road commanding a panoramic view over the sea. The place was kept by a deaf old lady and her tailless cat.
Then, without pausing at the sanctuary, we turned to the left, and entered a shady garden, which formed a terrace halfway up the hill, at the extremity of which was situated the Donko-Tchaya in English, the Teahouse of the Toads. This was the place where Chrysantheme had wished to take us. The word 'mousme' means a young girl, or very young woman.
A bit of lane almost English in look, bowered in trees and winding delightfully like some human stream, led us to a teahouse. While we were ordering chaises a lot of children gathered to inspect us, thus kindly giving us our first view of the natives. They looked more open-eyed than Japanese generally, but such effect may have been due to wonder.
From the teahouse the path rose steadily enough for so uneducated a way, leaving the valley to contract into an open glen. The day, in the mean time, came out as it had promised, full and warm, fine basking weather, as a certain snake in the path seemed to think. So, I judge, did the porters. If it be the pace that kills, these simple folk must be a long-lived race.
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.
A wonderful pathway zigzags down the face of the mountain to the river, in an almost vertical incline of 2000ft. At the riverside an embankment of dressed stone, built up from the rock, leads for some hundreds of feet along the bank, where there would otherwise have been no foothold, to the clearing by the bridge. The likin-barrier is here, and a teahouse or two, and the guardian temple.
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