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Updated: August 7, 2024
In further consolation, the kuruma men turned out well on the road, and bowled us along right merrily. The road ran along the skirts of the mountains on the right, which fell in one long sweep to the river, a breadth of plain unexpectedly gored by streams. The canons were startlingly abrupt, and the darkness which now came on took nothing from the effect.
The first was the near meeting with another foreigner, which would seem to imply precisely the contrary. But the unwonted excitement into which the event threw Yejiro and me was proof enough of its strangeness. It was while I was sipping tea, waiting for a fresh relay of kuruma at Namerigawa, that Yejiro rushed in to announce that another foreigner was resting at an inn a little further up town.
Though the cars were some time in starting, so that I got well ahead of them, they could not admit me on the road, when my baggage kuruma turned out to be too slow, because I had not bought a ticket at the office.
Yokka-ichi is a small seaport, whence most travellers along the Tokaido take passage to Miya in the steam passenger launches plying between these points. The kuruma road, however, continues good to the Ku-wana, ten miles farther, whence, to Miya, one has to traverse narrower paths through a flat section of rice-fields, dikes, canals, and sloughs.
Upon that January noon when his kuruma rolled slowly in under the gate-roof, followed by anxious Kano and one of the male nurses from the hospital, she had turned toward him the old look of resentment: but, instead of the brief and chilling glance she had thought to use, found herself staring, gaping, in amazement and incredulity.
She will feel again to-night the faint touch of little hands, yet will not turn her head to look and laugh, as in other days. Over the mountains to Izumo, the land of the Kamiyo, the land of the Ancient Gods. A journey of four days by kuruma, with strong runners, from the Pacific to the Sea of Japan; for we have taken the longest and least frequented route.
Two of the porters came on with us, as much for love as for money, as far as Kamiichi, where we were to get kuruma. A long tramp we had of it across leagues of ricefields, and for a part of the way beside a large, deep canal, finely bowered in trees, and flowing with a swift, dark current like some huge boa winding stealthily under the bamboo.
On the morrow morning we took the road in kuruma, the road proper, as Yejiro called it; for it was the main bond between Noto and the rest of Japan. This was the nearest approach it had to a proper name, a circumstance which showed it not to be of the first importance.
The autumn maples smeared the scene with infected blood; and the stone foxes in front of the shrine of Inari sneered and grinned at the devil world which their foul influence had called into being through the black witchcraft of lechery, avarice and disease. Yo no naka ni Ushi no Kuruma no Nakari-seba, Omoi no iye wo Ikade ide-mashi?
At last, after some painful groping in the dark, and repeated resolves to proceed on foot to the town and summon help, I chanced to stumble upon a stray kuruma, which had incautiously returned, under cover of the darkness, to the scene of its earlier exploits.
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