Not to have come suggested itself as the proper solution, unfortunately an impracticable one, and being there, to turn back was inadmissible. So I took myself in hand and started. For the first few steps I was far too much given up to considering possibilities. I thought how a single misstep would end. I could see my footing slip, feel the consciousness that I was gone, the dull thuds from point to point as what remained of me bounded beyond the visible edge down, down. . . And after that what! How long before the porters missed me and came back in search? Would there be any trace to tell what had befallen? And then Yejiro returning alone to Tokyo to report—lost on the Dragon peak! Each time I almost felt my foot give way as I put it down, right before left, left before right.
Then I realized that this inopportune flirting with fate must stop; that I must give over dallying with sensations, or it would soon be all over with me. I was falling a prey to the native Lorelei—for all these spots in Japan have their familiar devils—subjectively, as befits a modern man. I numbed sensibility as best I could and cared only to make each step secure. Between the Nirvana within and the Nirvana below, it was a sorry hell.
In mid-career the path made an attempt to recover, but relapsed to further footprints in the sand. At last it descended to a brook. I knelt to drink, and on getting up again saw my pocket-handkerchief whisking merrily away down stream. I gave chase, but in vain; for though it came to the surface once or twice to tantalize me it was gone before I could seize it. So I gave over the pursuit, reflecting that, after all, it might have fared worse with me. If the Lorelei had hoped to turn my head, I was well quit of my handkerchief for her only trophy.
Shortly after this, the main stream divided into two, and the left branch, which we followed, led up to a gorge,—beyond a doubt the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet. I do not remember a landscape more ghastly. Not a tree, not a blade of grass, not even decent earth in the whole prospect. Apparently, the place had been flayed alive and sulphur had then been poured into the sore. Thirty years before a cataclysm had occurred here. The side of one of the mountains had slid bodily into the valley. The debris, by damming up the stream, caused a freshet, which swept everything before it and killed quantities of folk lower down the valley. The place itself has never recovered to this day.
Although the stream here was a baby to the one below, it was large enough to be impassable to the natural man. From our woodcutter friends, however, we had learned of the leavings of a bridge, upon which in due time we came, and putting the parts of it in place, we passed successfully over.
We now began to enter the snow in good earnest, incipient glacier snow, treacherously honeycombed. It made, however, more agreeable walking than the boulders. The path had again become precipitous, and kept on mounting, till of a sudden it landed us upon an amphitheatral arena, dominated by high, jagged peaks. One unbroken stretch of snow covered the plateau, and at the centre of the wintry winding-sheet a cluster of weather-beaten huts appealed pitiably to the eye. They were the buildings of the Riuzanjita hot-springs; in summer a sort of secular monastery for pilgrims to the Dragon peak. They were tenanted now, we had been told, by a couple of watchmen. We struck out with freer strides, while the moon, which had by this time risen high enough to overtop the wall of peaks, watched us with an ashen face, as in single file we moved across the waste of level white.
XVI.
Riuzanjita.
We made for the main hut, a low, mouse-colored shanty fast asleep and deep drifted in snow. The advance porter summoned the place, and the summons drew to what did for door a man as mouselike as his mansion. He had about him a subdued, monkish demeanor that only partially hid an alertness within,—a secular monk befitting the spot. He showed himself a kindly body, and after he had helped the porters off with their packs, led the way into the room in which he and his mate hibernated. It was a room very much in the rough; boards for walls, for ceiling, for floor, its only furnishing a fire. It was the best of furnishing in our eyes, and we hasted to squat round it in a circle, in attitudes of extreme devotion, for it was bitter cold. The monkish watchman threw a handful more twigs on the embers, out of a cheerful hospitality to his guests.
The fireplace was merely a hole in the floor, according to Japanese custom, and the smoke found its way out as best it could. But there was very little of it; usually, indeed, there is none, for charcoal is the common combustible. A cauldron hung, by iron bars jointed together, from the gloom above. It was twilight in the room. Already the day without was fading fast, and even at high noon, none too much of it could find a way into the building, now half buried under the snow. A second watchman sat muffled in shadow on the farther side of the fire. He made his presence known, from time to time, by occasional sympathetic gutturals, or by the sudden glow of a bit of charcoal, which he took out of the embers with a pair of chopstick fire-irons to relight his pipe. The talk naturally turned upon our expedition, with Yejiro for spokesman, and from that easily slid into the all-important question of guides. Our inquiries on this head elicited nothing but doubt. We tried at first to get the watchmen to go. But this they positively refused to do. They could not leave their charge, in the first place, they said; and for the second, they did not know the path. We asked if there was no one who did. There was a hunter, they said, near by who was by way of knowing the road. A messenger was sent at once to fetch him.