On the opposite side of the ship, up forward, passengers were telescoped against the rail. It was some time before Nathan discerned the great, weird, snow-white cone, high and vague in the clouds, guarding the portals of the East, though no shore was visible yet. But the shore loomed quickly after that, though the mountain outline faded.
During lunch he glanced through the dining-room port-holes to see low, sandy coast slipping past on the north, as though the liner had entered an inland river. A chalk-white lighthouse on which the sun dazzled—gray, jagged cliffs against the northern horizon—boats hugging the beach; they were at the mouth of Tokio Bay. They would dock at Yokohama late that afternoon.
And when the vessel veered sharply northward, in the ensuing two-hour ride up that bay, with the smoke pall of Yokohama hanging in the sky ahead and weird, thatched-cottage, dwarf-pine, deep-bowered shores gliding away on east and west, the man’s heart beat with pardonable excitement. In a handful of hours he might meet his father.
It would be a dramatic meeting, not without a trace of pride on the part of the son.
It was a wonderful ride up to Yokohama. The sunshine was dazzling. The mazarine water was a-shimmer with whitecaps and spectrums. A bizarre touch was given that seascape by scores of sampans, native fishing boats, with long rudders and leg-o’-mutton sails, that worked so close to the incoming leviathan as to disclose their contents,—fish poles, nets, discarded clothing, coils of rope.
Yokohama’s smoke drew closer. It was ten minutes of five and the sun was beginning to sink over the city’s western hills, when the mighty engines stopped at last and the soul of the ship delivered her bulk to fretty little tugs that finally worked her up against her dock. The pilings creaked with the shock. The hawsers tightened.
The voyage was ended. Nathan had reached Japan!
As a dozen half-naked coolies pulled and groaned and jabbered and cried, getting the high gang-plank raised, handkerchiefs waved on the dock. Friends recognized friends. Relatives called joyously to relatives.
The bulk of the crowd on shore were Japanese,—ludicrous old men in black nightshirts and wooden sandals, heads shaded with cheap straw hats, baggy umbrellas clutched by their middles; somber-clad, high-coiffured Japanese women surrounded by slathers of babies; here and there the figure of a “foreigner” in pongee, a white face anxiously seeking the lines of humans high above, along the rail.
Nathan looked for his father. At any moment he might meet him.