“Rice field,” muttered my friend before I could question him.
The stench of the strongly fertilized paddy swamp was almost insufferable, and our discomfort was not lessened by the maddening swarms of mosquitoes. We crossed a narrow dyke and splashed along with quickened step through a second field worse than the first. Still another dyke, and then, beyond the third field, we sighted higher ground, above which loomed the dimly outlined tops of gigantic trees.
“The Tokaido!” cried Yoritomo.
A hundred yards across the last fetid swamp brought us up the bank and into a broad smooth road beneath the dense gloom of a double row of cryptomerias. We were upon the famed Tokaido, or East Sea Road, which connects Yedo with Kyoto and the southwestern provinces of Japan. To my surprise, Yoritomo crossed over, instead of turning along the road. As I followed, he pointed to a wooded hill, upon which a group of lofty trees and the black mass of a small peak-roofed building stood out against the brightening sky.
Skirting the edge of the Tokaido, we soon came to a path that led us windingly around through high coppices and up the far slope of the hill. The last of the clouds were now sweeping away to the northward, and the eastern sky was gray with the pallor of the false dawn. We gained the round of the hill, and passed between a pair of heavy wooden pillars, cross-tied with a square lintel-beam and a massive roof-beam, or framework, with upcurving ends.
“A torii,” muttered Yoritomo. “We come to a temple, not an inn.”
Though I caught a hint of disappointment in his tone, he led on up the bend of the hillcrest and across a shrubbery, to the front of the small grass-thatched building in the midst of the towering pines.
“It is a miya—a Shinto temple,” he murmured. “Yet we need food as well as rest.”
“They will give us no food, when we come as fellow-priests?” I exclaimed in mock indignation.
“Even when a miya is not deserted, the priests of Shinto seldom dwell in or near it,” he replied, and I heard him sigh. He was as near outspent as myself. But suddenly I saw his bent form straighten. He faced about to the western sky, with upraised arms, and his voice rang clear and strong in a salute of reverent joy: “Fuji-yama! Fuji-san!”