Yoritomo touched my arm and pointed to something lying on the opposite side of the road. I looked closer, and saw that it was the corpse of a peasant, mangled by terrible sword cuts.
“A drunken fool,” he said, unmoved by the horrible sight. “No sober man would have been found in the road after it had been sanded for the passage of a daimio.”
Before I could reply, a little bell tinkled in the road behind us, and Yoritomo drew me quickly out of the middle of the thoroughfare. I glanced about and saw two runners racing towards us at headlong speed. One carried the little bell I had heard, the other bore a small bundle on a stick, across his shoulder. Both were stripped to their loincloths, though at first glance I thought that they were clad in tights, so completely were they covered with animal designs tattooed in red, blue, and white.
In a moment the couriers had dashed past us and were flying on, regardless of the stately cortege that barred the road. With the murdered peasant fresh in mind, I looked to see the Satsuma men turn about with sword and lance to avenge this outrage upon the dignity of their lord. To my vast astonishment, the solemn ranks split apart all along the centre of the road at the first tinkle of the little bell, and the naked runners raced on without a check through the midst of the procession.
“Carriers of despatches for the Shogun,” explained Yoritomo in response to my look of amazed inquiry.
Here was food for thought to last me into Shinagawa, slow as was our pace. Nowhere in the world had I witnessed such solemn state as was exhibited by this daimio cortege, a state so exalted that men were killed for venturing within sword-sweep of the procession’s vanguard. Yet at the tinkle of a bell, all had yielded the road to a pair of naked, sweaty, unarmed postmen. What, then, must be the sublimity of rank and state arrogated to himself by the master of this prince? Yet the father of the quiet, mild-mannered gentleman trudging along in the dust beside me was the blood kinsman of that Oriental lord of lords.
We were close upon Shinagawa before I realized that the sun was far down the western sky and fast sinking behind a bank of black clouds. As I looked up my eye fell upon a rude pillory, standing near the roadside on ground raised above the level of the rice swamp. Along the top of the rude structure sat five roundish objects sharply outlined against the blood-red sky. Looking closer, I made out ghastly human faces—a crow flapped up from the ground, with a hoarse cry, and began pecking at one of the severed heads.