We have been for the last twenty hours on the Inland Sea of Japan. I have spent the whole day on the bridge or in the bows of the Saikio Maru, and the sea in its incomparable beauty surpasses all ideas formed by written pictures. It is a succession of the most perfect inland lakes, varying in breadth from forty miles to a few yards, and with mountains rising around the shores. These mountains have a peculiar look that I have seen nowhere else so marked. They have great zig-zags of sands running up and down their sides, indicated by a sparse vegetation. It gives to them a mottled and zebra appearance, and this feature is common to them all. Many of their castle-like crags are fringed with fir trees, whilst often their sides are deeply terraced to the water's edge, and planted with paddy and sweet potatoes. Little brown thatched villages, with their big roofs crowding down over the mud walls, lie hidden up the many inlets and winding channels, or nestle on the beach of the sea-shore.
Time and again we look back on the undulating track of our course, and cannot see the winding entrance now shut out by islands. We look forward; there is a rounded shore. It is a perfect lake. Just as we enter the narrowest and therefore most beautiful passage, the Captain points out a barren cone, well ensconced behind several mainlands of islands. Not so very long hence we shall be passing underneath, but on the other side of that mountainous peak, and so it goes on, one intricate strait succeeding another.
The Inland Sea is a long procession of islands. The Japanese reckon several thousands, but it would be an impossible task to count them, as one by one they unfold themselves to us, as we steam among their fantastic shapes. For there are islands of every imaginable form and size, square and round with sugar-loaf cones, or extinguisher tops with castellated summits, or small and four-sided like a floating haystack. Some are so large that they are like the mainland, and others mere thimble points. Here, there are three tiny islands formed of three little rocks, with a tuft of palms, and joined by a spit of sand; there, a barren heap of sand with a solitary fir tree on the top; or, again, it is a mountain island with deep evergreens.
Hundreds of junks come sailing by, with the pleasant swish of the water against their keels, whilst even here they have screens of paper, covering the wooden trellises of their sides. They are a perpetual delight, these curious whimsically-fashioned vessels, with their ancient prows standing high out of the water, recalling as they do the old prints of the fleet of the Spanish Armada, of which they are exact reproductions. Their one square sail is attached to a single mast, and pulls up and down like a curtain on running strings, and the black patch sewn on it denotes the owner's name.
What makes the Inland Sea so beautiful? The Japanese themselves have no name for it, nor have their poets ever sung its praises. I suppose we must say it is the innumerable islands, though many of these are the reverse of beautiful in themselves. Or is it the great ocean steamer threading so swiftly the successive intricate windings and snake-like passages? No. I think it is perhaps the ceaseless variety. Every minute the scene changes; it is never the same for more than a few seconds, and is often so beautiful that you want to look on both sides at once. Certainly in the course of our many wanderings, we have never been more pleased than with this Inland Sea. All the morning the sky was overcast, and a purple haze rested lightly on the mountains, and the sea was pale green. But in the afternoon, just as we reached the most charming part by the northern course, the sun broke through, and we had the long afternoon shadows, with softened sunlight, on this scene of rare beauty.
We have had, too, a wonderful conjunction of pleasures in a superb sunrise, and a more exquisite sunset in one day. This morning at Kobe I saw sunrise. At six o'clock the sky was heralded with crimson glory. To-night the sun, as it always does in these Eastern latitudes, sinks suddenly—a golden ball into an orange bed. It is going, going slowly, until gone behind that purple range, and just as it is dying the symmetry of the orb is cut into and spoilt by a jutting rock on the mountains. Then, whilst darkness falls over the land, the golden bed begins to glow and palpitate with colour, and spreads and spreads, until the exquisite pink, and lilac and green, melt into the cobalt vault above. The sea is extended in a tremulous sheet of dazzling gold, and the black prows and the figures on the junks are cut in Vandyck relief out of this gilded background. The silver moon rises over a lighthouse on the other side of the ship. Soon little mackerel clouds separate themselves, and float over the sky, and as we watch a ruddy glow succeeds, growing blood-red, and bathing sky and sea in a crimson flood, which dies, oh! so lingeringly and wistfully into purple darkness.
Nor is this all, for by-and-by, as we are looking over the bulwarks, perhaps still a little awe-bound by this superb display of nature, a great, green, electric wave rises up from the dark sea, thrown aside by the ships' bows, and breaks away in gleaming particles. It is the brilliant phosphorescence of the spawn of the sardine, which in daytime is spread out like red dust upon the waves. Sometimes it is so bright that the whole sea is alight, and in passing a channel ships have to stop, being unable to see the coast.
At two o'clock in the morning we stop to coal at Shimonoseki, in the straits between the main island of Nippon and that of Kyushu. A party of geishas, or dancing girls, come on board and go over the ship, and I get up in time to see a row of little policemen with their coloured lanterns going down the gangway.
The next day, at midday, we again come into an even more beautiful inland channel. Islands of emerald green are seen across a white-flecked sapphire ocean on a glorious day—a line of white creamy foam denting the black rock-bound coast, above which rise volcanic strata of grey and black cliff of the most wonderful formations, deformed and twisted into spinular columns and basaltic contortions, and the unwieldy mass of the huge ship is made to double round sharp angles, and avoid the conical islands sticking so irritatingly out in the mid-ocean passage. In one place there is a lighthouse towering on a rock so rugged and steep, that no path can be cut in the cliffs, and we see the derrick and the basket which are used for letting people up and down, from the boats to the platform of the phare.
We are pointed out the place, where, in this far-distant island of Japan, François de Xavier, in 1549, first landed to try and Christianize the natives. We are in an inner channel. Far, far away, beyond two grey islands on the sky line, lies Corea. Whichever way we look there is a dotted circuit of islands, always of those whimsical shapes. Occasionally, miles ahead, one little island will stand all solitary amid the ocean, or in another you can see the half that has fallen away, leaving a clear cut scar, an abrupt termination to the island. But the most curious of all is an enormous bell-shaped rock, standing erect in the ocean with a perfect arch through it.