“To-morrow, after midday,” repeated Yoritomo, in a voice still and impassive as his face. He turned to me. “You will do well to get a full night’s rest, brother. We have work before us.”
“But what’s in the wind, Tomo?” I demanded in English, as Kohana ran to draw out a pair of silk quilts from a drawer in the lesser recess of the tokonoma.
“There’ll be the devil to pay,” answered my friend, the glint in his narrowed eyes boding ill for the “devil.” He nodded towards Kohana. “I will tell you more fully in the morning.”
The hint was sufficient. I rose and followed the girl down a short passage to a small room that was to be my sleeping chamber. She prepared my bed by spreading the two quilts on the soft mats of the floor and placing at the head a little lacquered box rounded on the top with a small roll of soft paper. This was the pillow. Over all she hung a large canopy of mosquito netting. There remained only for her to light a tiny night-lamp, kowtow, and withdraw. Five minutes later I was fast asleep, with my jaw upon the paper pad of my wooden pillow.
How soon my dreams began and how long they continued I have not the slightest idea. But I had a prolonged succession of the most fantastic visions imaginable, in which brown-skinned, slant-eyed elves and gnomes, clad in outlandish costume, were ever committing outré and unexpected antics. Sometimes the performance was of grotesque horror, as when severed heads, dripping blood, flew at me with malignant ferocity. This must have come from a blending of Yoritomo’s Japanese goblin tales with the ghastly spectacle of the execution-pillory outside Shinagawa.
After a time I found myself sauntering through an Oriental Paradise in company with a Buddhist angel, who bowed down and worshipped me as the God of Snow. Immediately I became a snow image, fast melting to liquid beneath the noontime sun. I melted and flowed away down through a fetid rice field, into the blue Bay of Yedo. Too late I discovered that my angel was none other than the beautiful Princess Azai, daughter of the Shogun.
I was now aboard a Japanese junk, flying up the bay to save the Princess from the guns of the American fleet. The giant steam frigates were fast overhauling my slow craft, their decks cleared for action and their gun-ports swung open, tier above tier, ready for the bombardment of ill-fated Yedo. Suddenly the junk struck upon a shoal, over which it was driven by the billows, only to strike again and again. As the mast went by the board and the hull crunched to splinters under my feet, the stately Susquehanna, flying the blue-starred broad pennant of Commodore Perry, swung around and fired a thunderous broadside into our shattered wreck.
With a shout of terror, I leaped up, and found myself reeling about a matted floor, in the dim light of a tiny lamp. An instant later the floor heaved and rocked under me with a sickening motion that flung me to my knees. All around I could hear the creak and groan of straining timbers. Above me my dizzy eyes made out a ceiling of odd-patterned bamboo-work and swaying walls whose gilt panels glinted in the faint light.
The screens of the end wall suddenly brightened, then shot open, and through the gap Yoritomo came darting towards me, lantern in hand.
“Earthquake!” he cried, springing across to extinguish my little night-lamp, which was on the point of jarring from its shelf.