No portion of the Nakasendo is finer than that near Midono; the valley narrows and the road in many places overhangs the rushing Kisogawa, the vegetation is luxuriant, walnuts, oaks, chestnuts, and maples shade the road, and great groves of bamboo wave their plumes in every little breeze which comes down from the mountains through the ravines in which they grow. By the river-side I noticed many fine-leaved plants; some old garden friends, and others new to me; yellow wagtails fluttered jauntily from rock to rock, and lines of swallows on the telegraph wires showed that autumn was at hand.
I turned off from the Nakasendo at Hashiba, where it begins to ascend the Magome Pass, and took a little cross-country track, turning eastward again up the valley of the Hirosegawa, which, after two days’ walking, brought me to Iida and the banks of the Tenryugawa. This road was not mentioned in my guide-book, but Nakajima Sanju, the jinrikisha man who had accompanied me all the way from Kami-no-suwa, maintained that it was practicable, and that he could take my baggage through in his kuruma. He did
it, too, but I occasionally had to hire two extra men to help him, and in some places they and Matsuba had to carry kuruma, baggage and all. There was one long climb through a dense wood which particularly impressed me; I walked so far ahead of them that I could only just hear the continual cry, “Yo-sha! Yo-sha!” with which the men encouraged each other; the masses of foliage above me, the shrubs and ferns below them, enclosed me in a green maze; from under the arched roots of a colossal cryptomeria a clear little spring gushed out; occasionally a raucous-voiced jay flew across the path, or I had to stop and examine the huge toads, seven or eight inches long and almost as broad, that sprawled about on the road-side. When my men overtook me at a tea-house some miles farther on, one of them was carrying a brace of these toads skinned. They looked as big as the “poulet” of a cheap restaurant, and he told me that they were very good for weakly children.
At Tokimata I engaged a boat with five men to take me down the rapids as far as the Tokaido; the river was running high, and they would not do it for less than twenty-four yen--a good price for a journey of only ten or twelve hours; but when you remember that it takes them ten days or a fortnight to haul the boat back, it does not seem excessive. Don Pedro’s remark, “What need the bridge much wider than the flood?” does not apply to most of the Japanese rivers; usually they are just a trickle of water among a wide bed of pebbles, which is filled after heavy rains with a raging torrent, but Lake Suwa serves as a reservoir for the Tenryugawa, and it always has enough water to be navigable. The boats used on it are about thirty feet long, flat-bottomed and flat-sided, with a square stern and a high, pointed bow; they are very loosely built and flexible, and the bottom boards are so thin that they wabble like a sheet of paper when passing over rough water or shallows. A heavy foot would break through them, and it is necessary to tread only on the bamboos which are laid lengthwise, resting on the cross-ribs.