Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan | Page 7

being now permitted to board the next
train, I ensconced myself in a kind of parlor compartment, which,
fortunately, I continued to have all to myself, and was soon being rolled
westward across the great Musashi plain, ruminating. My chief quarrel
with railway rules is, I am inclined to think, that they preach to the
public what they fail to practice themselves. After having denied me a

paltry five minutes' grace at the station, the officials proceeded to lose
half an hour on the road in a most exasperating manner. Of course the
delay was quite exceptional. Such a thing had never happened before,
and would not happen again--till the next time. But the phenomenal
character of the occurrence failed to console me, as it should no doubt
have done. My delay, too, was exceptional--on this line. Nor was I
properly mollified by repeated offers of hard-boiled eggs, cakes, and
oranges, which certain enterprising peddlers hawked up and down the
platforms, when we stopped, to a rhythmic chant of their own
invention.
The only consolation lay in the memory of what travel over the
Musashi plain used to be before trains hurried one, or otherwise, into
the heart of the land. In those days the journey was done in jinrikisha,
and a question of days, not hours, it was in the doing, --two days' worth
of baby carriage, of which the tediousness lay neither in the vehicles
nor in the way, but in the amount of both. Or, if one put comparative
speed above comparative comfort, he rose before the lark, to be
tortured through a summer's day in a basha, or horse vehicle, suitable
only for disembodied spirits. My joints ached again at the thought.
Clearly, to grumble now was to sin against proportion.
Besides, the weather was perfect: argosies of fleecy cloud sailing
slowly across a deep blue sky; a broad plain in all its spring freshness
of color, picked out here and there with fruit trees smothered in
blossom, and bearing on its bosom the passing shadows of the clouds
above; in the distance the gradually growing forms of the mountains,
each at first starting into life only as a faint wash of color, barely to be
parted from the sky itself, pricking up from out the horizon of field.
Then, slowly, timed to our advance, the tint gathered substance, grew
into contrasts that, deepening minute by minute, resolved into detail,
until at last the whole stood revealed in all its majesty, foothill,
shoulder, peak, one grand chromatic rise from green to blue.
One after the other the points came out thus along the southern sky:
first the summits behind Ome; then Bukosan, like some sentinel,
half-way up the plain's long side; and then range beyond range
stretching toward the west. Behind Bukosan peeped Cloud's Rest, the
very same outline in fainter tint, so like the double reflection from a
pane of glass that I had to shift to an open window to make sure it was

no illusion. Then the Nikko group began to show on the right, and the
Haruna mass took form in front; and as they rose higher and the
sunbeams slanted more, gilding the motes in the heavy afternoon air,
they rimmed the plain in front into one great bowl of fairy eau de vie de
Dantzic. Slowly above them the sun dipped to his setting, straight
ahead, burnishing our path as we pursued in two long lines of flashing
rail into the west-northwest. Lower he sank, luring us on, and lower yet,
and then suddenly disappeared beyond the barrier of peaks.
The train drew up, panting. It was Takasaki, now steeped in saffron
afterglow. The guards passed along, calling out the name and
unfastening the doors. Everybody got out and shuffled off on their
clogs. The baskets, Yejiro, and I followed, after a little, through the
gloaming.
It was not far to the inn. It was just far enough, at that hour, to put us in
heart for a housing. Indeed, twilight is the time of times to arrive
anywhere. Any spot, be it ever so homely, seems homelike then. The
dusk has snatched from you the silent companionship of nature, to
leave you poignantly alone. It is the hour when a man draws closer to
the one he loves, and the hour when most he shrinks from himself,
though he want another near. It is then the rays of the house lights
wander abroad and appear to beckon the houseless in; and that must be,
in truth, a sorry hostelry to seem such to him.
Even Takasaki bore a look of welcome alike to the foreign and the
native stranger, which was certainly wonderful for Takasaki. The place
used not to fancy foreigners, and its inns bandied the European traveler
about like