The floor steadied with the passing of the shock. I crawled from under the mosquito net and staggered to my feet. Yoritomo seized me by the sleeve, and dragged me out the way he had come. I heard Kohana calling to us to hasten. We turned a corner, and saw her dart towards us across a room, beyond which gleamed a square of early daylight. Again the floor lurched. We all three sprawled prone upon the mats, while about us the rafters and beams creaked louder than before and the walls seemed toppling to crush us.
“This way!—the shutters are open—this way, my lord!” shrilled Kohana. She plucked at Yoritomo’s sleeve, and scrambled back, tossing about in a manner that would have been irresistibly comic but for the terror of the moment.
We followed as best we could, now crawling, now staggering half erect, like drunkards. Through it all Yoritomo clung fast to his lantern, too dazed to extinguish it, yet fearfully conscious of the peril of fire. All around me things were reeling. I clutched at a swaying wall-post, a few feet short of the gap in the wooden shutters that closed in the outer side of the veranda. Before I could glance about, a fearful shock flung me across the veranda and out into a bed of roses.
To my sorrow, I found that roses in Japan have thorns. Also I caught a glimpse of the massive tiled eaves seemingly about to pitch upon me. I leaped out of the roses, clear across a path, and fetched up with a skip and a trip, coming down squarely in a bed of purple irises. In perfect unison with my own arrival at stability, the earth spasms ceased as suddenly as they had begun.
From behind a bush on my left a voice murmured in quavering, gurgling delight: “My lord, you are safe, unharmed?”
“Unharmed,” answered Yoritomo, and he called in an anxious tone, “Woroto!”
“All present and accounted for,” I replied, rising dizzily, to face them across the bush in the red dawnlight. “You are not hurt, Kohana San?”
“Nor my lord!” she cried, with a soft chuckle of delight. “After all it was only a little wriggle of the fish’s tail.”
“Fish’s tail?” I inquired.
“The great fish upon whose back rests the land of Dai Nippon,” explained Yoritomo, with a twinkle in his black eyes.