The birds rested, standing in the water, preening their oily backs and white bellies, and flapping their ragged wings, which seemed to have been clipped. The apprentice caressed his bird, the fishermen and the steerers laughed and exchanged jokes and chatted generally, with all the good nature and making light of hard work which is so essentially Japanese.
Then the birds began to fight, and to show that peace was not their pleasure. Fresh pine knots were thrown into the cressets; each man took his place; the polers pushed off; the birds strained at the strings; and all da capo. A little longer we watched, and then we let the boats glide past us; the fires faded again into a haze of light as they went down the river toward the bridges of the town, now dotted with people.
Then we were carried to the shore as we had left it, and were piloted home through the streets, now filled with lanterns and movement. We found our outraged artist in cookery still indignant over our neglect of food, but he was gradually appeased, and made up for his hungry masters a fairly sufficient meal. Cigars, a scrutiny of my despairing sketches, and a long look at the lovely melancholy of the river and mountains before we closed the shojis for the night.
[FROM KAMBARA TO MIYANOSHITA—A LETTER FROM A KAGO]
September 28.
I am writing in a kago.[13] You do not know what an achievement this is, but I shall explain later on what a kago is, why I am in it, and why it is not exactly the place to expect a letter from. To begin at the beginning, we were yesterday afternoon at Kambara, on the gulf of Suruga Bay. We had eaten there in an inn by the water, while I watched through the screens the waving of a palm tree in the wind, which was now blowing autumnally and had cleared the sky and enlivened us with a hope of continuous view of Fuji. Along the beach, as we rode away, the breakers ran far up the sand, and the water was green as emerald from the brown, wet shore to the distant blue haze of the ocean in the south. At the end of the great curve of the gulf stretched the lines of green and purple mountains, which run far off into Idzu, and above them stood Fuji in the sky, very pale and clear, with one enormous band of cloud half-way up its long slope, and melting into infinite distance toward the ocean. Its nearest point hung half across the mountain's base, more solid than the mountain itself, and cast a long shadow upon it for miles of distance. Above, the eye could but just detect a faint haze in the delicate blue of the sky. Best of all weather, we thought; a breeder of bad weather, according to our men, who, alas! knew more of it than we did. For a mile now, perhaps, we ran along between the sea and the abrupt green wall of hills, so steep that we could not see them, and, turning sharply around a corner, beheld Fuji, now filling the entire field of sight, seeming to rise even from below us into the upper sky, and framed at its base by near green mountains; these opened as a gate, and showed the glittering streak of the swollen Fujikawa, the swiftest river in Japan.
The lower eastern slope was cut off by clouds, but its western line, ineffably delicate in clearness, stretched to the left out of our range of vision. Below its violet edge the golden slope spread in the sun, of the color of an autumn leaf. Along the center of this province of space the shadow of the great cloud rested. The marks of the spurs of the mountain were as faint as the streaks of the wind on a grain-field. Its cone was of a deep violet color, and as free of snow as though this had been the day of poetic tradition upon which the snow entirely disappears to fall again the following night. No words can recall adequately the simple splendor of the divine mountain. As A—— remarked, it was worth coming to far Japan for this single day.
Right into this marvelous picture we rode, through green plantations and rice-fields, which edged the bases of the nearest hills and lay between us and the river. There we found no means of crossing. All bridges had been carried away by the flood. The plain was inundated; travelers had been detained for a week by a sea of waters, and were scattered there and in neighboring villages, filling every resting-place; and, worst of all, the police officials would not allow us to tempt the fishermen to make the dangerous crossing.