CHAPTER XII.

JOURNEY IN THE NORTH (1879).

IN September of this year, our department was put under a new Chief, General Yamada, whose name is well known in connection with the events of 1877, but whom I never had the felicity to meet. Inouye Kaworu succeeded Mr. Terashima as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and there were various other changes. My hoped-for trip northwards became an actual fact at last, and I started away in the Meiji Maru, the lighthouse tender, to inspect the " tramway," as it was called, at Kamaishi, in Iwate Prefecture, accompanying so far Mr. Yamaō, then Vice-Minister, afterwards Minister of Public Works.

The Meiji Maru is a capital Clyde-built screwsteamer of about a thousand tons, and fitted very comfortably for passengers, as she is frequently used to save persons of some importance the time and trouble of overland journeys. She was full of stores, and had even a good part of the deck taken up with apparatus and fittings of various kinds, not only for lights of the different classes that distinguish a really large number of the important headlands of the empire, but in this case for the first installation of "sirens" on the coast.

What with the Engineer of the lighthouses, and his inspecting staff, who were at home, of course, in the boat; with the Vice-Minister, a financial pundit who accompanied him on his inspection tour, various minor officials and servants, and myself and interpreter, we were rather crowded up, and I had to take my Japanese cook, who was accompanying me as a factotum for the return overland, into my own cabin. We slipped away down the bay of Yedo in weather that looked ominous of a typhoon or earthquake (which some wiseacres profess to discover previously advertised in the heavens), or something disagreeable; but outside it was found to be all right, just enough roll to afford me an opportunity of squaring accounts-well, never mind that. We rounded the promontory that forms the south-eastern extremity of Hondō (a name seldom heard, but really that of the main island of all the three thousand odd that go to make up the Japanese Empire), and came to our anchor in the roadstead of Inuboye, near the mouth of the Tone river, about six A.M., on the 22nd. Here the Engineer and his staff went ashore to inspect, and the ship delivered stores to a very small extent, for there was a long swell rolling in, that moved the ship so that it was unsafe to open the main-deck ports. So the bulk of the stores destined for this place had to be taken all round the islands, and brought back to Tōkiyō thence to start again by inland navigation for Inuboye some two months later. This is not a nice anchorage, as, though there is good holding ground, it is quite open to the east and south; and, moreover, on her next trip the Meiji Maru discovered involuntarily that there was

a sharp isolated peak of rock close handy, upon which she sat unexpectedly, with results unpleasant, but not serious.

It was not known when I was there, however, and might have been unknown for ages but for this accident, as the Meiji Maru was the only vessel drawing fifteen feet of water, that ever came there, and she only about twice a year for a few hours. We were surrounded by fishing boats, the crews apparently taking a holiday to watch the ship, for I couldn't see that they were trying to catch anything. On the return of the shore party we were off at once, hoping to reach harbour in the neighbourhood of the next light before the moon should go down; but we couldn't quite manage it, and our careful skipper was too canny to try and feel his way into a bay through rocky ground in pitch darkness; so he slowed down as soon as he made the light, and when we rose early on the 23rd, before the sun was up, there was the revolving light gently winking at us from the bluff on which it was perched. We landed as soon as possible, by boat, on some rocks about a mile from the lighthouse, and the ship went off to the regular harbour, some half-dozen miles away on the mainland, for this was Kin-ka-san, the holy island of the east coast, at the north-eastern corner of the deep bay of Sendai.

While the officials interested were at their work in the lighthouse, or planning the site of the new siren, I wandered up the hill, getting some charming glimpses into little bays on either hand, where the fishermen's boats scarcely rocked at their anchorage, and the rocky

scarps could be followed by the eye far down beneath the tranquil waters. From the top of the first knot of spurs projecting from the main hill, that bears the temples on its brow, I looked out over the silvery Pacific —five thousand miles of unbroken ocean between me and the Californian coast. It almost seemed as if we were out of the world, and that there could be no real necessity for the white lantern that was just peeping over the brow of the cliff, seated on a little plateau between two rifts where the rock fell away on either side, and left a clear view for more than half a circle over the waves and along the jagged coast line. I heard the monkeys moving and chattering in the trees above me, though I could not catch sight of one of them; but some deer sprang out of the ferns close by me, and one big black buck came up within twenty yards and looked as if he would pitch me down the hill just as soon as not. Like the man on the stile, I “continued to smile,” till I softened his heart, and he went off, avec des daims," with his does in the wood.

I was so charmed with the place, that I asked the Vice-Minister, when we met at tiffin in the keeper's quarters, for his interest to secure me the position of light-keeper at Kinkasan, when my occupation as a railway engineer should come to an end in the land. Even the "siren" did not dismay me, for I could scheme to make it play tunes, and welcome the fog-bewildered Yankee skipper who should approach the coast, with the soul-inspiring strains of his national anthem; or charm the coast-bound gull with the sympathetic notes of "Oh! for the wings" on Sunday evenings.

Our business done, we walked across the island, over a ridge about a thousand feet high, to a village and group of temples over against the mainland, and were ferried across a strait about half a mile wide, to the shore under a wooded cliff, whence another little walk brought us to the village and harbour of Aikawa and our ship, a distance altogether of about eight miles. We were lucky in our weather, which had permitted us to land at once on the island; as if it had been rough outside we must have walked both ways.

The unloading of stores was not completed till late at night, so we lay at anchor till the dawn, slipped out between the reefs, and rounding the island, exchanged signals with the lighthouse, and sped away north along a picturesque coast. About noon we approached the headland that marks the entrance to the bay of Kamaishi, a narrow arm of the sea running some miles up between the hills, and dropped anchor at one o'clock.

P―, the resident Engineer, whom I had only once seen for a few minutes in 1875, greeted me cordially; and as his wife and children and their impedimenta were all going away by the Meiji Maru to Hakodaté, there to catch the coast mail for Yokohama, and so depart for their ancestral home, he eagerly retained me to bear him company during my stay at Kamaishi, by his lonely hearthstone. I did my best to console him, and indeed got up a mild quarrel, which did him a world of good, as to whether, being on the spot in response to a request of his that certain locomotives should be condemned by authority, I should accede to the request of the Vice-Minister that I shouldn't be bashful about men