My baggage was piled in the middle of the boat, and a seat arranged on it for Matsuba and myself; one man took the long stern oar while the other four worked in the bows, and within a few minutes of the start we were plunging down between high cliffs, charging at rocks which we only avoided by a few inches, swirling round in eddies at the foot of one rapid while the men got breath for the next, and until we stopped for our mid-day meal at the little
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE STREET, ATAMI--VRIES ISLAND IN THE DISTANCE]
village of Nakabe there was no time to sketch, or think, or do anything but enjoy the wild, exciting race. The river twists, between high mountains, down a gorge with such sharp curves that it is often impossible to see any exit, and our boat would rush down, heading straight for a cliff against which the water dashed furiously; while one man in the bows whacked the side with his paddle for luck, and then stood ready with a pole, the other three pulled like mad, and just when I thought “we must come to grief this time,” she would suddenly turn and swish round the corner into smoother water. The rapids continued to be amusing, though the fun was not quite so fast and furious, all the way to Kajima, where the mountains end and a broad plain begins; below here the river still ran swiftly, but smoothly, divided into several channels by long gravel banks, on which gray willows and bamboos grew, and snipe and herons congregated. We met strings of boats being laboriously towed along: the wind generally blows up stream, and they are
[Illustration: ON THE TENRYUGAWA, NEAR KAJIMA]
able on these lower reaches to help themselves by hoisting a sail, but I shall never understand how they get their boats back through those upper rapids. It was getting dark when we passed through the ruins of the old Tokaido bridge, but in the dusk I could distinguish a row of familiar Noah’s-ark-like forms; they were current-mills moored in the river; and then I knew what my day had lacked--the companionship of the man with whom I had passed so many hundreds of them on the Danube. There was nothing on the Danube quite so sporting as these rapids, but I think it would be possible to get through them in a decked canoe, such as those we used on that river. The pace is tremendous; we did the ninety miles from Tokimata to Naka-no-machi in ten hours of actual travelling, though the latter portion of the journey was on comparatively sluggish water.